The major concerns of VLSI designers in the past were performance, area, reliability and cost. Power was only a secondary issue. In recent years, however, power, area, and speed have become equally important. There are many reasons for this new trend. Primarily, rapid advancement in semiconductor technology over the past decade has enabled designers to integrate many digital CMOS circuits on a single chip. However, the desirability of using these circuits in portable operations has necessitated the development of low-power technology. Portable applications range from desktop computers and audio-video based multimedia products to personal digital assistants and personal communicators. These systems demand both complex functionality and low power, which make their design challenging. The hierarchical energy analysis tool lets designers quickly estimate power consumption of various data-path architectures, enabling a power consumption comparison at a high level before the layout design is carried out.
['Janardhan H. Satyanarayana', 'Keshab K. Parhi']
Power estimation of digital data paths using HEAT