PET - requirements

Requirements

Having COMPASS properly installed and working. The suggested configuration is a directory named work, containing all the netlists and layouts.

A file containing the mapping of output pins and the capacitance of the inputs for each cell of the library. It is needed to associate the capacitance of node x to the output of cell i. Example.

A file containing the energy dissipated per transition for each cell in the library. These values are obtained by cells' characterization, either vendors' or customers' characterization. Example.

A configuration file (usually called .pet ) containing general parameters such as: power supply voltage, clock frequency, time window of the simulation, reference to the two files above mentioned.

Two files in suitable COMPASS sim format, containing the simulation constraints and the test vectors.

File .petrc in the PET working directory. This file contains the references to some paths used by PET.

Netlist of the circuit under evaluation in the PET working directory. The layout extracted netlist is in COMPASS [nle] format.

The PET working directory, usually different from the COMPASS working directory, must contain at least the following two files at start-up:

.petrc
unitName.nle

Running PET on sub-blocks

After having run PET on a unit, we can also evaluate the power dissipated into the blocks composing it. In order to do this, we need an extra file that references a specific block with the instance name in the COMPASS netlist hierarchy. This name can be obtained by inspecting the top-level schematic [nls] in COMPASS Logic Assistant. This reference file must have the same name of the unit as the prefix (i.e. same name as in [nle]) and suffix .inst. Example: unitName.inst.