Modeling and Simulation Methodology Techniques for Advanced Low Power Communication Circuits

This paper targets heterogeneous low power communication circuits and Systems that will be used in the future generations' hand-held devices (PDA's, mobile phones). Those platforms will probably contain a few studies have emerged and considerable amount of on-chip memories. An optimized communication architecture will be required to interconnect them efficiently. Many communication architectures have been proposed in the literature: shared buses, bridged buses, segmented buses and more recently, Networks-on-Chip. Being battery-powered devices, the energy consumption of the platform is a critical issue. However, with the exception of buses, power consumption has been mostly neglected in interconnection networks. Only very recently have a few studies emerged in that domain. The Power Aware Wireless Sensors (PAWiS) simulation framework becomes an essential tool to evaluate design and simulation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) models including Soft-Ware (SW) and Hard-Ware (HW) platforms. PAWiS is an OMNeT++ based discrete event simulator written in C++. It captures the node internals (modules) as well as the node surroundings (network, environment) and provides specific features critical to WSNs like capturing power consumption at various levels of granularity, support for mobility, and environmental dynamics as well as the simulation of timing effects. The design of integrated low- power wireless sensor nodes involves the convergence of many technologies and disciplines. Submicron complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices, micro-electro- mechanical system filters, on and off chip electromagnetic elements, sensors and dc-dc converters are some of the technologies that will enable pervasive systems such as wireless sensor networks. High system complexity requires the use of many simulation environments during design: algorithm simulators, behavioural and transistor-level circuit simulators, electromagnetic (EM) simulators and network simulators. It is shown that highly integrated, self-contained systems require multiple-domain simulations to uncover complex interactions between domains. In this paper we present a flexible and extensible simulation framework to estimate power consumption of sensor network applications for arbitrary HW platforms. Specific examples of block and system level design methodologies used in low-power wireless systems are presented here.