What's your opinion on Primetime Px?

[lizeer]

hi,
could anyone help me by give an input or review about primetime px?
right now we are doing evaluation for this tools and will like to have some opinion from others..

 

[jbeniston]

how to start primetime px

Have a look on deepchip.com

 

[lizeer]

Re: primetime px

hi,
already look at deepchip earlier but will like if somebody can give opinions about the performance of the tools or other low power design tools from different vendor..

 

[MarcS]

Re: primetime px

PrimeTime PX is the power analysis extension of the PrimeTime family of signoff verification tools from Synopsys (PrimeTime does timing, PrimeTime SI does signal integrity).

Power analysis is some respects dead easy. To calculate the power consumption of a gate all the tool needs to do is provide the activity on the pins and just look up the appropriate value in the power model table. The rest is simply adding up all the power consumption numbers for all the gates and wires. All tools do an equally good job here because they all use the same power model - .lib . Given exactly the same activity input, they will all give the same result.

The really difficult part of power analysis is the generation and the propagation of the activity values. You see, node activity statistics are rarely available for all nodes. The reason is that activity files are produced by RTL level simulators and power analysis tools like PrimTime PX operate on the gate level netlist. The nodes in the gate level netlist do not completely match the nodes found in the RTL netlist (synthesis and physopt introduce changes). So it is almost always necessary for the power analysis tool to propagate the known activity on some nodes (e.g.: FF outputs) to all the blank nodes in the netlist. And this is where the real magic occurs.

PrimeTime PX's activity propagation technology is average to poor. There are worse product on the market, but there are also better ones (e.g.: Azuro's PowerCentric). If you are interested in RTL level power analysis (quite a different technology than gate level analysis) then Sequence Design has the best product.

 

[naveen_zs]

Re: primetime px

Hi MarcS,
I dont know about Power centric tool , but PT-PX is working good for RTL power anlysis (which is roughly giving 30 %to 50 % accuracy when compared to silicon results

 

[why_wai95]

Re: primetime px

hi naveen_zs,

do you have any workshop material for PrimeTime PX??

Appreciate if you could upload them here.

thank you

 

[manajel1]

hi,
i hope u r doing well.
i m doing the same thing like you, and i want to discuss with you about ur results and mine. ok?