Digital Twin | AI-drives Visual Picture of the Power Flow

AI-drives Visual Picture of the Power Flow at Architectural Stage of Design

Design community has fully embraced Computer Aided Design(CAD) and Electronics Design Automation (EDA) tools for system design, however system modeling is one of the area, where some of the product design experts are not fully aware of high value (beneficial /shift-left) tools in the market. Smart companies are effectively leveraging system modeling for holistic power and performance analysis of full system.  After a scan of such tools in the market, VisualSim Architect from Mirabilis Design emerges as a popular choice by leaders in this market for power analysis.

Mirabilis offering an AI-driven tool called Power Digital Twin in VisualSim. VisualSim is made exclusively for power and performance trade-off analysis targeting a broad range of system-design including satellite payloads, automotives and advanced AI semiconductor chips at conceptual stage. Electric power flow is the invisible fluid of electrons flowing inside every system, where engineers seek to view this flow as if they view from naked eye. Power Digital Twin provides a visual picture of the power flow as good as flow is visible in dynamic operating conditions. Power Digital Twin fully simulates the working model of the system visualizing every aspect of power flow across each functional block/device.

Let’s investigate the features and benefits of Power Modeling using VisualSim:

Power Digital Twin replaces present in-accurate, expensive and time-consuming method of power analysis such as use of spreadsheets, logic or board-level simulation and prototypes.  These methods are limited in system capacity scope and very late in the design process. VisualSim Power Digital Twin can simulate a full SoC in 15 minutes and a full vehicle in 30 minutes to generate the performance-power metrics and conduct architecture trade-offs.

Power Metrics can be tracked at every instant of time and generate consolidated power, average, cumulative, battery lifecycle and thermal characteristics for heat and temperature. System designers can save huge amounts of time and enabling them to innovate further on features and functions of the systems in offering better solutions than the competitor. The clear whole picture of power activity is presented for actionable design changes at architecture level. VisualSim provides thermal information to thermal/mechanical engineers to effectively design cooling systems and mechanical structures of the device to handle the rise in temperatures.

Deliver power estimates for all hardware/Silicon IP/Network blocks, software/program code execution and network data flow tasks. By having complete power analytics picture of the system, designers can improve the total power efficiency of the system in budgeting the available power to each functional block to operate at different states of standby, sleep, low power, turbo-boost and any custom modes to deliver optimized performance and power distributions at its best. In the present software centric systems VisualSim enables tracking the power flow while running the different software programs for all types of conditions.

Semiconductor SOC chip designs are continuously moving towards deeper nodes such as 3 nm and even lower, where each node brings performance and power improvement in the range of 20-30%. Each node shrink require complete power and performance analysis at architecture stage. Power Digital Twin enables rapid regression for different semiconductor process nodes, clock speeds and other configuration using complex expressions.

VisualSim is designed to provide time-to-market advantage to its customers from its first version of the product to the whole series of upgrades by significantly bringing down development time using the same base architecture effectively.

Mirabilis provide full support during initial implementation for seamless migration to VisualSim based solutions. Along with providing rich and large IP of fully updated functional models, Mirabilis quickly integrate any custom function models for cutting edge applications such as Tensor processing elements, GPU, NPU and such AI computing elements in your processor architecture. Mirabilis solutions fully support chiplet based 3D IC design. 

The tool features support for latest standards such as SystemVerilog and a power domain specific standard called Unified Power Format (UPF). VisualSim Generates UPF input file, VCD and SystemVerilog for Unified Verification Methodology.

Each application case has different power requirement. Here are some examples:

Thousands of kilometers away in the space, the orbiters and landers on the Moon communicate with each other and send pictures to earth continuously after years of operation powered by solar panels. In this type of stand-alone non-grid powered systems, you have on one-side the power consumption, and on the other-side power generation and storage such as batteries. In such systems the reliability, system uptime and critical function operations need to be ensured by optimizing, managing power source as well as consumption. In satellites solar panels undergo variation in sunlight-exposure when the satellites are in the shadow of the planets during which they don’t receive sunlight. Designers of such systems need to analyze power generation pattern of such sources and should have contingency plan for worst situations. Power Digital Twin has Time-Energy and Motor-Energy models allowing sizing of power generators.

Electric cars now provide a driving range of 100s of KMs on a single charge. In electric vehicles the stored battery energy needs to be monitored to determine the accurate drive range and provides the user safe travelling and alerts. Power Digital Twin has a Power Storage- Battery model that captures rate of consumption, impact of continuous charging, lifecycle loss due to power spikes and thermal shock and heat and Temperature data.

SoC chip in an IoT embedded system operating in an open field in an oil refinery monitors key parameters with a battery charged from harvested energy resources for months. In the above case of IoT based embedded systems, the power need to be efficiently managed to operate longer by opting for multiple states of operations. For designing semiconductor chips, Power Digital Twin offers complete SoC power modeling and analysis to IP level allowing engineering to design power and performance matched chips.

Latest Smartphone lasts longer on a single charge compared to older versions. In smart phones and wearable smart devices, the products ability to operate longer hours on battery power is key selling factor, demanding designers to save every bit of power and manage efficiently by allowing the device to switch to operate in multiple states. Power Digital Twin enables design of mobile/portable personal devices with longest battery life for complete system and the chips powering theses systems.

To share with you an example case of performance analysis, as shown in this image below, a functional block level hardware platform can be simulated on VisualSim. This is a quad core processor architecture based hardware platform.

Image: A functional block level hardware platform simulated on VisualSim.

Here in this simulated system, one of the processor core threads can be edited to have high priority in task execution through a simple table like form as shown in the image below.

Image: Parameter editing table of a functional block called Mapper.

Once you run the power performance on this simulated hardware platform with the change of task priority, VisualSim plots the performance charts for power, temperature, and other related performance parameters as shown in the image below.

Image: Performance charts of power, temperatures and other related parameters.

You can learn more on this in a webinar available online at: www.mirabilisdesign.com

VisualSim is already a popular tool in the market and is used by leading product companies in the aerospace, automotive and semiconductor markets world over.

To know more details on this product visit: www.mirabilisdesign.com