Think power, think statistics, think again….

This article presents information on the statistical approach to manage power in 65nm designs. Researchers argue that deterministic static analysis, assigning fixed values for IR drop, leakage currents and so on according to worst-case evaluations does not consider statistical variations in the underlying silicon. Using a statistical model like Monte Carlo type techniques is to come up with a normal distribution around a chosen performance target. During a panel session at DAC last week Andrew Yang, CEO of Apache Design Solutions, spoke about the need to think of power in terms of "power integrity".