ProPower by Prolific Inc. (Acquired by ARM)

Product Description

Prolific's ProPower is final-pass power optimization software that reduces leakage power 25% - 75%, even on designs that have already been optimized by other tools. ProPower achieves these results by optimizing the use of threshold voltage (Vt) cells in a design.

Benefits
25% or more leakage power reduction
No change to TNS or WNS
No increase in area
Decreases dynamic power

Fine-Tune Vt Cell Selection
Optimizing use of threshold voltages is the most effective single approach that can be taken to reduce leakage power. Because ProPower runs as the final tool in the place-and-route flow, it is easy to determine exactly how much it improves any design. Because it uses the previously placed-and-routed design as a starting point, its improvements are above and beyond those produced by optimization performed earlier in the design flow.

ProPower is most effective when used with mult-Vt libraries, but it can also improve designs using a single threshold voltage. ProPower can be used to reduce active power.

Maintain or Improve Timing
ProPower is used in combination with Prolific's ProTiming timing optimization engine. Together, the tools ensure that any changes made to reduce power will not result in total net slack (TNS) or worst net slack (WNS). Because ProTiming gets its timing information directly from Synopsys' PrimeTime, it does not suffer from correlation errors. In conjunction with PrimeTime SI, ProPower avoids introducing signal integrity violations.

How It Works
ProPower achieves power savings by intelligently analyzing designs to determine where power is lost, then strategically replaces power-leaking cells with functionally equivalent cells which have lower passive power losses. If multiple threshold voltage (Vt) cells are used, ProPower can swap low-Vt cells with higher-Vt cells. In designs that have not yet been optimized, ProPower typically uses 0.5% to 5% low-Vt cells. If the place-and-route tool supports multiple Vt cells and has already optimized the Vt usage, ProPower will further optimize Vt usage, typically replacing from 50% to 80% of the remaining low-Vt cells.

Because ProPower has access to the detailed parasitic, timing, and signal integrity (SI) information, it is able to achieve better, lower-power results than other tools. Used in multiple-Vt mode, ProPower does not require a place-and-route ECO pass.

ProPower can also be used to reduce both active and leakage power, even if a single Vt is used. In this mode, ProPower reduces the drive strength of non-critical cells to reduce power without worsening critical paths. This mode requires an ECO pass to correct for movement of terminals.

Minimum Hardware/OS Requirements
2GHz processor
2GB RAM
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 or later
Solaris 8 or later
HP-UX 11.0 or later

ProPower

Market Segment(s)

• Embedded
• Enterprise
• Home
• Mobile

ARM Processor(s)

• ARM7EJ-S
• ARM7TDMI
• ARM7TDMI-S
• ARM720T
• ARM920T
• ARM922T
• ARM926EJ-S
• ARM940T
• ARM946E-S
• ARM966E-S
• ARM968E-S
• VFP9-S
• ARM1020E
• ARM1022E
• ARM1026EJ-S
• VFP10
• ARM1136J-S
• ARM1136JF-S
• ARM1156T2(F)-S
• ARM1176JZ(F)-S
• ARM11 MPCore
• Cortex-A53
• Cortex-A57
• Cortex-A8
• Cortex-M3
• Cortex-R4
• SC100
• SC200
• SC300
• ARMv8
• StrongARM
• XScale
• Other

Physical IP

• Standard Cell Libraries