Statistical estimation of average power dissipation in sequential circuits

In this paper, we present a new statistical technique for estimating average power dissipation in sequential circuits. Due to the feedback mechanism, in sequential circuits power dissipation in consecutive clock cycles are temporally correlated, which violates the basic requirement of statistical mean inference procedures. We overcome this problem by using a randomness test and a sequential procedure to select a proper independence interval, which in turn is used to generate random power samples. A distribution-independent stopping criterion is applied to analyze the sample data and terminate the simulation upon achievement of the accuracy specification. The technique is successfully applied to a set of benchmark circuits.