Stream synthesis for efficient power simulation based on spectral transforms [CMOS logic]

One way of minimizing the time required to perform simulation based power estimation is that of reducing the length of the input trace to be fed to the simulator. Obviously, the use of a reduced stream may introduce some errors in the estimation results. The generation (or synthesis) of the short input sequence to be used for power simulation must then be done in such a way that the resulting error is minimized. This paper introduces a new stream synthesis method whose peculiar feature is that of using spectral analysis techniques based on the discrete Fourier transform to determine a reduced sequence of vectors that enables to shorten the overall power simulation time at a very limited accuracy decrease. The effectiveness of the proposed synthesis procedure is demonstrated by the results we have obtained on the Iscas'85 combinational benchmarks for a variety of input streams characterized by different statistical and correlation properties.