CoFluent Design, and Docea Power to accelerate power exploration for electronic systems optimization

PARIS & GRENOBLE-MOIRANS, FRANCE: CoFluent Design and Docea Power, announced their collaboration to deliver interoperable solutions to accelerate power exploration and optimization of electronic systems.

CoFluent is a leading electronic system level (ESL) company that provides system-level modeling and simulation to accelerate innovation in embedded devices. Docea is a design-for-low-power company that delivers software for power and thermal analysis at the architectural level. The companies’ products – CoFluent Studio and Docea Power’s Aceplorer – are now part of an interoperable solution that allows systems architects to optimize power usage more efficiently.

Stéphane Leclercq, CEO of CoFluent Design, said: “Power estimation and analysis is a crucial element when exploring and optimizing the architecture of electronic systems as 80% of power gains can be obtained at this stage. However, true system-level optimization requires analyzing all system dimensions at once: behavior, performance, power, and cost. The interoperability between CoFluent Studio and Aceplorer allows for describing all the architectural dimensions of an electronic system and analyzing them from a single model. Full power optimization gains can be obtained only when all dimensions in system architecting have been investigated under various dynamic application scenarios.”

Ghislain Kaiser, CEO of Docea Power, added: “Making tradeoffs between performance and power consumption is a critical activity at the architectural level for complex system designs. But exploring a large solution space that involves all the dimensions can be a nightmare without the right modeling methodology and the right tools. By working with CoFluent, we can separate the views of a complex electronic system and have the models work together in an efficient way to accelerate power exploration and optimization of electronic system designs.”

CoFluent Studio is a system-level toolset for modeling real-time embedded applications and use cases, and simulating their execution on multiprocessor/multicore platforms. Models are described graphically in standard unified modeling language (UML) or with the CoFluent domain-specific language (DSL). Transaction-level modeling (TLM) SystemC code is automatically generated for behavioral, time and performance prediction.

Docea’s Aceplorer models, explores, and optimizes static and dynamic power and thermal behavior of whole electronic systems. It integrates a consistent power data management methodology for capturing and simulating power behavior. It maximizes model reuse across teams and design flows from system-level to silicon measurements.

Both tools share a common methodological approach that separates the architecture from the applications.

Aceplorer relies on a power state model to describe power information for the different components of the system. A platform architecture model describes voltage and clock domains and how those components are interconnected in the system. These models can be captured directly in Aceplorer and simulated for power and thermal analysis.

CoFluent Studio provides a specific instrumentation interface to generate the activity of platform components into Value Change Dump format (VCD) that Aceplorer can interpret and run on the power model. With CoFluent Studio, users capture in an effective way complex and dynamic use case models, including computations and communications scheduling aspects, for behavioral, time and performance exploration and optimization.

The same models can now be used for detailed power and thermal exploration and optimization within Aceplorer. Users of CoFluent Studio don’t need to re-capture models into Aceplorer and can rely on a single system-level reference description.