A cycle-accurate joulemeter for CMOS VLSI circuits

Abstract

Cycle-accurate energy measurement is very useful in reducing the energy consumption in the CMOS VLSI circuits, which was reported in [1]. This paper introduces a simple energy measure system, describes three energy models for the CMOS circuits, and derives their energy equations for a clock edge. Then, we compare their accuracy with the simulation and experiment results for a simple inverter. We found that instead of representing all load capacitance as a capacitor to ground, we should separate the capacitance to ground and that to supply for accurate energy analysis in implementing an accurate joulemeter.