Power consumption constitutes a major challenge for electronics circuits. One possible way to deal with this issue is to consider it very soon in the design process in order to explore various design choices. A typical design flow often starts with a high-level description of a full system, which imposes to provide accurate models. Power modelling techniques can be employed, providing a way to find a relationship between power and other metrics. Furthermore, it is also important to consider efficient power characterization techniques. The role of this paper is, first, to provide an overview of RTL to transistor level power modelling and estimation techniques for FPGAs and ASICs devices. Second, it aims at proposing a classification of all approaches according to defined metrics, which should help designers in finding a particular method for their specific situation, even if no common reference is defined among the considered works. Index Terms-Power consumption, power modelling, power estimation, high-level power estimation, FPGA, ASIC, tools.. Antifuse Technology (e.g., Actel TM , Quicklogic TM): an antifuse remains in a high-impedance state until it is programmed into a low-impedance or "fused" state (Figure 9.18). This technology can be used only once on one-time programmable (OTP) devices; it is less expensive than the RAM technology.

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In this paper, we present a new, simple, accurate and fast power estimation technique that can be used to explore the power consumption of digital system designs at an early design stage. We exploit the machine learning techniques to aid the designers in exploring the design space of possible architectural solutions, and more specifically, their dynamic power consumption, which is application, technology, frequency and data stimuli dependent. To model the power and the behavior of digital components, we adopt the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), while the final target technology is Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). The main characteristic of the proposed method, called NeuPow, is that it relies on propagating the signals throughout connected ANN models to predict the power consumption of a composite system. Besides a baseline version of the NeuPow methodology that works for a given predefined operating frequency, we also derive an upgraded version that is frequency aware, where the same operating frequency is taken as additional input by the ANN models. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we perform different assessments at different levels. Moreover, technology and scalability studies have been conducted, proving the NeuPow robustness in terms of these design parameters. Results show a very good estimation accuracy with less than 9% of relative error independently from the technology and the size/layers of the design. NeuPow is also delivering a speed-up factor of about 84× with respect to the classical power estimation flow.

Today reducing power consumption is a major concern especially when it concerns small embedded devices. Power optimization is required all along the design flow but particularly in the first steps where it has the strongest impact. In this work, we propose new power models based on neural networks that predict the power consumed by digital operators implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These operators are interconnected and the statistical information of data patterns are propagated among them. The obtained results make an overall power estimation of a specific design possible. A comparison is performed to evaluate the accuracy of our power models against the estimations provided by the Xilinx Power Analyzer (XPA) tool. Our approach is verified at systemlevel where different processing systems are implemented. A mean absolute percentage error which is less than 8% is shown versus the Xilinx classic flow dedicated to power estimation.

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