Introduction - 2023.2 English

Power Design Manager User Guide (UG1556)

Document ID
UG1556
Release Date
2023-10-18
Version
2023.2 English

This document describes the AMD Power Design Manger (PDM) usage for power estimation. Accurate power estimation during the early design cycle is the key to the lowest possible power envelope for any design. Early estimation is crucial for choosing the right device, taking advantage of architectural benefits, changing the design topology, and using different IP blocks. This helps in making better trade-offs well ahead of the design phase, letting you meet specifications and get your product to market faster.

AMD offers the PDM tool for power estimation, that is typically used for estimation before design implementation and AMD Vivado™ Report Power, which is used during design implementation with better accuracy. PDM tool supports all the AMD Versal™ devices families, AMD Kria™ devices and all the AMD UltraScale+™ device families except RFSoC devices.

Note: Continue to use XPE for AMD UltraScale+™ RFSoC devices as the PDM tool does not support this family yet.

AMD recommends the following power methodology to overcome any power challenges throughout the design cycle.

Figure 1. Power Methodology

During the conceptualization and architectural exploration phases of a project, it is crucial to assess the power budget with limited availability of architectural details of the design. PDM tool addresses most of the early power estimation challenges. It is typically used before the design and implementation phases of a project and it assists with architecture evaluation, device selection, appropriate power supply components, and thermal management solutions specific to your application. PDM tool considers your design resource usage, toggle rates, I/O loading, and other factors. These factors, combined with the device models, help calculate the estimated power distribution. The device models are extracted from measurements, simulation, and extrapolation.

Accuracy of the PDM tool is dependent on two primary sets of inputs. They are:

  • Device utilization, thermal environment and solution, clock frequencies, enable rates, toggle rates, and other information you enter into the tool
  • Power characterization accuracy of the device data models integrated into PDM tool

For accurate power estimates of your application, enter the information as complete as possible. Modeling a certain aspect of the design too conservatively or without sufficient knowledge of the design can result in unrealistic estimates. Techniques to achieve worst-case estimates or typical estimates are discussed in this document.