Verifying complex power strategies with UPF 4.0.
Power efficiency has become a must-have in today’s ASIC and SoC designs. It’s no longer just about squeezing out more performance. It’s about doing so without draining the battery, wasting energy or overheating the system. Whether the chip is headed for a smartphone, a server rack in an AI datacenter or the control system of an autonomous vehicle, managing power wisely is as critical as meeting timing or ensuring functional correctness.
The challenge, of course, is that modern SoCs aren’t getting any simpler. They’re packed with multiple CPUs, accelerators, memory hierarchies and high-speed interfaces, all operating under different performance and power constraints. To keep energy use in check, engineers rely on techniques like power gating, voltage islands and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). But these strategies don’t work in isolation. They depend on careful coordination between RTL, verification and implementation teams.
And here’s where things get tricky. Without a consistent way to describe and validate power intent across the entire design flow, teams risk running into serious problems: logic that breaks when a domain powers down, blocks that consume more energy than expected, or silicon that behaves unpredictably in the lab. Any one of these can mean missed deadlines, late-stage bugs or expensive respins. That’s why getting power intent right from the start of the design process is more important than ever.
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