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6.1 Introduction to Low Power in Verilog

Category Advanced Verilog Tutorial

Keywords: Switching Power, Internal Power, Static Power


Impact of Power Consumption

Portability

The lower the power consumption, the longer the working time of electronic products under the same battery capacity, and the difficulty of designing the battery capacity and volume of portable devices will also be reduced. For example, the increasingly thinner design of mobile phones without affecting performance is due to the crucial role played by low power design.

Performance

The greater the power consumption, the more energy is consumed, the more heat is generated, and the performance of various devices will be affected. For example, when using a mobile phone for a long time, the phone will feel hot, and various applications may also experience lag.

Cost

When low power design is not considered, the implementation method of a function may be more cumbersome, the number of devices increases, and the product area increases; at the same time, when the power consumption is too high, cooling devices must be considered, which increases the assembly cost. In short, low power design has many advantages and is also the development trend of digital design in the future.


Types of Power Consumption

Power consumption can generally be divided into dynamic power, static power, and surge power.

Dynamic Power

Dynamic power mainly includes switching power (also known as toggle power) and short-circuit power (also known as internal power).

1. Switching Power

In CMOS digital circuits, the power consumed when charging and discharging the load capacitance is switching power. As shown in the following CMOS NOT gate:

When Vin = 0, the PMOS above is on, the NMOS below is off; VDD charges the load capacitance Cload. After charging, the level of Vout is high.

When Vin = 1, the PMOS above is off, the NMOS below is on, and the load capacitance discharges through the NMOS. After discharging, the level of Vout is low.

This on-and-off change, that is, the charging and discharging of the power supply, forms the switching power. The formula for calculating switching power is as follows:

Where VDD is the supply voltage, Cload is the equivalent load capacitance of the subsequent circuit, and Tr is the toggle rate of the input signal.

2. Short-Circuit Power

The toggle of a signal is not instantaneous. Therefore, when the input signal toggles, there is always a period when the PMOS and NMOS are both on, forming a path from the power supply VDD to the ground VSS, creating a short-circuit current and generating short-circuit power. As shown in the following inverter circuit diagram:

The formula for calculating short-circuit power is as follows:

Where Vdd is the supply voltage, Tr is the toggle rate, and Q is the charge that flows from the power supply to the ground during one toggle.

Static Power

In CMOS circuits, static power consumption is mainly caused by leakage current, which is often related to the process.

The composition of leakage current mainly includes: PN junction reverse current I1, sub-threshold leakage current I2 between the source and drain, gate leakage current (including the induced leakage current I3 between the gate and drain), and the tunnel leakage current I4 between the gate and substrate.

In general, leakage current mainly refers to gate leakage current and sub-threshold current. For ultra-deep sub-micron processes, tunnel leakage current becomes one of the main currents.

leakage_power() { value: 0.053318; when: "!A1 A2 !Z"; related_pg_pin: VDD; } ……

Static power consumption is related to the state of the cell, meaning that power consumption will vary with different input and output signal states. By looking up the state, the corresponding static power consumption can be obtained. When analyzing power consumption in practice, one would not manually search for relevant parameters to calculate power consumption, as the workload would be too immense to estimate. It is often done with the help of some power analysis tools, extracting power consumption information from these standard cell libraries for integrated calculation.

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