US Patent 7313510 Methods for estimating power requirements of circuit designs

One embodiment of the present invention is a method for estimating a power requirement of a circuit design that includes steps of: (a) selecting a set of targeted Energy Arcs and/or Power Arcs; (b) creating one or more circuit states using the set of targeted Energy Arcs and/or Power Arcs; (c) back-tracing the one or more circuit states over one or more simulation clock cycles to form a start circuit state and a stimulus segment; (d) simulating the stimulus segment in forward time progression and determining which Event Arcs in Energy Arcs and/or which Condition Arcs in Power Arcs are satisfied at each stimulus clock cycle; and (e) recording data at each stimulus clock cycle that is utilized to estimate the power requirement.