Netlist Power Analysis Flow with RTL Stimulus

Hi all,

I am exploring Joules for the power analysis of a netlist synthesized with Genus. Eventually I want to plot the power activity of a stimulus along with the frames. The .vcd is parsed with the read_netlist command. Then, although a stim#1 is generated with various frames, when "compute_power -mode time_based" is executed it returns: "-time_based option is set for single frame SDB, : using average analysis", resulting in a single framed stimulus.   

I suppose that my main proble here is to record the set of frames for the stimulus. In fact, when I do either "compute_power -mode time_based" or also "propagate_activity -mode time_based" the result is that the stimulus has only one frame, preventing the time_based mode to be executed (and therefore executing the average one). I extensively explored the lecture slides, labs, user manuals, command reference and the scripts provided along with the rapid adoption kits, but nothing seems to address such issue.

Here are the script steps to generate elaborated database: 

- load technology files (libs, lefs, capt);

- read HDL files;

- elaborate design;

- add sdc constraints;

- write_db elab.db;

Script for power analysis from vcd:

- rtlstim2gate -init $ELAB_JDB -keep_libraries;

- read_netlist;

- read_sdc;

- read_stimulus -frame_count 10 -file dump.vcd; 

- compute_power -mode time_based;

From the above script, what I would expect is a stimulus equally separated in 10 timeframe (/stim#1/frame#1/, /stim#1/frame#2/, ... /stim#1/frame#10/), but what I get instead is only /stim#1/frame#1/ and compute_power automatically switches to average mode, preventing me to plot the activity.

Any suggestion or indication is appreciated. Thank you.

Regards,
Dario