Specifications

CHAPTER 10: POWER ANALYSIS
INTRODUCTION
174 ■ INTRODUCTION TO QUARTUS II ALTERA CORPORATION
Introduction
The Quartus
®
II PowerPlay Power Analysis Tools provide an interface that
allows you to estimate static and dynamic power consumption throughout
the design cycle. The PowerPlay Power Analyzer performs postfitting
power analysis and produces a power report that highlights, by block type
and entity, the power consumed. The Altera
®
PowerPlay Early Power
Estimator estimates power consumption at other stages of the design
process and produces a Microsoft Excel-based spreadsheet with estimate
information.
Figure 1. PowerPlay Power Analysis Flow
Performing Power Analysis with the
PowerPlay Power Analyzer
You can use the Quartus II PowerPlay Power Analyzer Tool (Tools menu)
after running Analysis & Synthesis and the Fitter successfully. You can
specify whether you want to use an input file, such as a Signal Activity
File (.saf) generated by the Quartus II Simulator or a Value Change Dump
File (.vcd) generated by another EDA simulation tool, to initialize toggle
rates and static probabilities during power analysis, and also whether you
want the signal activities used during power analysis to be written to an
output file. In addition, you can specify entity-based toggle rates and static
from Quartus II
Analysis & Synthesis
and Quartus II Fitter
Quartus II PowerPlay
Power Analyzer
quartus_pow
Signal
Activity
File (.saf)
Signal Activity File (.saf)
or Value Change Dump
File (.vcd)
Report
Files
(.rpt, .htm
)
Quartus II
Settings
File (.qsf)
PowerPlay Early
Power Estimator
Spreadsheet
power estimation file
(<revision name>_early_pwr.txt)
User-defined settings
from Quartus II
Compiler
from Quartus II
Simulator or other
EDA simulation tool