New Unified Power Format Standard

By DE Editors

The members and Board of Directors of Accellera (Napa, CA) have approved the unified power format (UPF) 1.0 as an Accellera standard. The organization provides design and verification standards used in the electronics industry. The open standard was developed over the course of five months by Accellera members working collaboratively with other interested companies.

The UPF standard is a convergence of donations from seven companies. Electronic design automation (EDA) vendor contributions were derived from years of use of their products on taped-out low-power designs. End customers contributed their internally developed optimization and analysis technologies dealing with application-specific power issues, especially for wireless and hand-held devices.

A UPF specification defines how to create a supply network to supply power to each design element, how the individual supply nets behave with respect to one another, and how the logic functionality is extended to support dynamic power switching to these logic design elements. By controlling the operating voltages of each supply net and whether they (and their connected design elements) are turned on or off, the supply network provides power at the level needed by the functional areas of the chip to complete the computational task in a timely manner.

The open standard permits all EDA tool providers to implement advanced tool features that enable the design of modern low-power chips. Starting at the register transfer level and progressing into the detailed levels of implementation and verification, UPF facilitates an interoperable, multi-vendor tool flow and aims for consistency throughout the design process.

According to Shrenik Mehta, chair of Accellera, "When leveraged in a design flow, our UPF standard will improve the efficiency and economics of how designers can optimize IC power requirements."

The Accellera UPF 1.0 standard specification is available at accellera.org.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.