ST-Ericsson adopts Docea ACEplorer to improve power choices

MOIRANS-GRENOBLE, FRANCE: Docea Power, the Electronic System Level (ESL) company that delivers software for early power and thermal analysis, announced that ST-Ericsson, a leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, has adopted and is deploying the ACEplorer to improve architectural-level power choices for SoC (System-on-Chip) and platform design.

ACEplorer models and optimizes dynamic power and thermal behavior of whole electronics systems. It integrates a consistent power data management methodology for capturing and simulating power behavior. By separating the architecture from the applications, ACEplorer maximizes models reuse usable across teams and design flows from system level to silicon measurements.

“We are proud that ST-Ericsson adopted ACEplorer tool to tackle power and thermal options for its complex design projects,” said Ghislain Kaiser, co-founder and CEO of Docea Power. “It demonstrates the maturity of our solution for managing efficiently power and thermal issues in demanding sectors like the mobile industry.”

Benefits of ACEplorer
Shared complex power and thermal design options in a consistent flow
ACEplorer allows several design teams to work in parallel and succeed in formalizing a structured power aspect for every architect and designer. ACEplorer’s communications capabilities –such as reports and diagrams – allow design teams to communicate key results to project leaders and managers.

Review of improvements early in the design cycle
In less than a few minutes, ACEplorer can deliver precise simulation results for many scenarios and variants so that system designers and architects can choose with more confidence the best options for Intellectual Property (IP), hardware/software partitioning, cost and power consumption.

More realistic scenarios when compared to spreadsheet percentages
ACEplorer goes beyond the aspect of pure power. It can take into account information about bandwidth, frequency, CPU load and temperature which is becoming critical issue so design teams can easily find the best system dimensioning.

Reusability and know-how capitalization
By separating power/thermal modelling from scenarios, ACEplorer allows design teams to easily reuse standalone models developed for previous projects. Models can be used as a documentation basis for the platform related power characteristics and concepts.