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ActivaSC: a highly efficient and non-intrusive extension for activity-based analysis of SystemC models

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Annual ACM IEEE Design Automation Conference archive
Proceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference table of contents

San Francisco, California

SESSION: Low-power design and analysis techniques table of contents

Pages 172-177

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-497-3

Authors

Cedric Walravens	K.U. Leuven - ESAT-MICAS, Heverlee, Belgium
Yves Vanderperren	K.U. Leuven - ESAT-MICAS, Heverlee, Belgium
Wim Dehaene	K.U. Leuven - ESAT-MICAS, Heverlee, Belgium

Sponsors

EDAC : Electronic Design Automation Consortium
SIGDA: ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation
IEEE-CAS : Circuits & Systems

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 9, Downloads (12 Months): 9, Citation Count: 0

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ABSTRACT

Today's highly integrated System-on-Chips (SoC) demand innovative architectural modeling means to cope with their energy constraints. In this context, SystemC has become a well-established simulation tool for Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) in the integrated electronics industry but it lacks the support for power modeling. This paper introduces ActivaSC, a flexible, fast, transparent and non-intrusive extension to the SystemC class library which allows capturing the activity information of a digital system being modeled. This information can then be post-processed to estimate power consumption. ActivaSC avoids time consuming design iterations as designers can assess architectural design trade-offs based on system activity early in the design flow. ActivaSC does not require any code alterations nor a specific API, so that it can be used with any modeling style. Finally, several benchmark tests illustrate the superior efficiency of ActivaSC. A speed-up of up to 75% in terms of elaboration overhead and 20% in terms of simulation overhead is realized with respect to prior art.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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