Palladium – Power Estimation Efficiency from Days to Minutes

In the competitive semiconductor industry, leading innovators consistently set the bar with high-performance and power-hungry silicon. Their latest multi-billion-gate designs exposed the practical limitations of traditional pre-silicon power estimation methods—which were slow, unscalable, and posed risks to fully optimized power and performance for next-generation AI silicon.

A major semiconductor customer used a gate-level power methodology that relied on traditional software tools, limited to a few million gates per job. Estimating power for very large blocks with real application workloads (billion+ gates and billion+ cycles) became impractical with traditional software power estimation methods.

To overcome this, the customer adopted Cadence's Palladium DPA's Hardware-Native Power Estimation (HW-NPE) technology. With this solution, multi-billion-gate designs were analyzed and power estimation performed across a few billion cycles in just hours—accelerating development and reducing power estimation time in a significant way.

Cadence partnered with key customers to measure power consumption and overcame scalability challenges using Cadence Palladium Platform's Hardware-Native Power Estimation (HW-NPE), which leverages specialized hardware and a compiler-based methodology to efficiently measure and analyze application power at the gate level. Key features of HW-NPE include:

• Next-Gen Estimation Engine: Capable of processing over a billion gates and performing power calculations for billions of cycles in just hours, delivering a 1000X or more improvement in turnaround time, ideal for the most advanced power-intensive silicon.
• High Accuracy: Delivers results with up to 97% accuracy versus sign-off power tools, providing reliable power data for critical power/performance optimization decisions.
• Unprecedented Visibility: HW-NPE provides full visibility into power consumption across billions of cycles with real-world applications, something previously impossible.

For example:

App1: A 1.26 billion-cycle application's end-to-end power analysis completed in just 42 minutes.

App2: A multi-threaded, 3.83 billion-cycle application's full power analysis was completed in 85 minutes.

This cycle visibility graph illustrates that users can "get visibility for every cycle amidst billions of cycles of power," a key feature for power profiling.

The Cadence Palladium DPA's Hardware-Native Power Estimation solution is a game-changer, enabling semiconductor innovators to overcome the limitations of traditional methods and achieve ambitious goals. By combining specialized hardware, ultra-fast compile, and power streaming capabilities, the technology enables detailed power analysis previously unattainable for multi-billion-gate designs.

With this newfound efficiency, engineering teams can focus on creating highly power-efficient designs, a strategic advantage that helps meet critical sustainability objectives. This methodology not only solves immediate challenges but also establishes a superior standard for gate-level power estimation in the semiconductor industry.

Success with this technology underscores a core belief that innovation is driven by partnership. The adoption of the Cadence Palladium DPA's HW-NPE helped deliver unprecedented precision in early-stage designs, enabling analysis across billions of cycles. This empowers companies to stay at the forefront of semiconductor innovation and set new standards for rapid, accurate power estimation.

If you're designing billion-gate AI/ML chips or GPU-accelerated applications and need early, accurate power modeling to boost energy efficiency and avoid costly design delays, connect with the Cadence Sales Support Team to discover how Palladium DPA's Hardware Native Power Estimation can help transform your development process

Discover the full story behind this breakthrough—visit the "Customers Stories" section at our Cadence Dynamic Duo Emulation and Prototyping page.