13.29.30 Activity and Hazards Reports

Traditional Power Analysis based on a VCD simulation file reports an average power value that will account for all nets switching in the design. This switching includes functional transitions and spurious transitions. Due to the delay of each gate, paths arriving at one internal gate may have different propagation delays. Therefore, a gate may exhibit

multiple spurious transitions before settling to the correct logic level. The Activity and Hazards Power Report allows to quickly identify gates and nets of the design that consume power because of spurious transitions. This is helpful to understand and further minimize power consumption. The activity and hazards report reads a VCD file and reports transitions and hazards for each clock cycle of the VCD file.

To generate an activity and hazards power report:

1. From the Designer Tools menu, choose Reports > Power > Power Activity and Hazards. The Activity and Hazards Power Report dialog box appears.
2. Select the options you want to include in the report, and then click OK. The activity and hazards report appears in a separate window.

You can also generate the activity and hazards report from within SmartPower. From the Tools menu, choose Reports> Activity and Hazards Report; or select a vcd file from the Modes and Scenarios toolbar, and from the right-click menu, select Tools > Power Activity and Hazards

The activity and hazards report dialog box is organized in the following panels: General, Partial Parsing, Top-Level Name, Glitch Filtering, and Clock Domains.