Open Access

Yanchen Shi

• This thesis presents a power simulation of a MIPS MicroAptiv UP Core implemented as a virtual ASIC prototype using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(TSMC) 65 nm CMOS technology. Based on the MIPS instruction set program data is generated and introduced in the simulation by means of initialization files. Before the simulation, technology specific SRAM modules are integrated into theMIPS core. Two different programs are used for power characterization. The first program performs frequent memory accesses by means of load/store word instructions, while the second program is a loop which operates on registers only and mainly increments addresses. The simulation is based on a virtual prototype which is generated by synthesis and place & route including post-layout parasitic extractions. The stimuli for the power extraction is generated via gate-level simulation and forwarded to the power calculation engine. The effect of X-propagation on gate-level simulations is avoided by modifying the address-related statements in the execution data path module, which use another form of 2 to 1 multiplexer, setting the output to zero for all input signals even with an initial value of ’x’ without changing the functionality. Finally, the consumed power is provided by reports generated by the power simulation engine. The memory-centric program consumes 35.39mW of internal power using instructions, which is 0.73mW less than the internal power of the register-centric program, and the overall average power is also lower by almost 0.7mW.