Negligible Power Values

[suhanimitra]

I have been trying to run a single-module Verilog file of mine but keep getting power values ~0 mw in the SiliconCompiler output. I've changed the period and tried numerous technology nodes (asap7, freepdk45, etc), but all are giving me the same issue. I get cellarea, memory, and other values but power doesn't have a value. I've also had this occur for other Verilog files of mine and am not sure how to address this. I have included the metrics table from this run below.

[gadfort]

@suhanimitra I would check that you have a clock defined in your design. Without one, I think you would just get leakage power which is fairly small. The default units for the power is mW, which may be too large for a small design. Before the run begins you may want to switch the units to uW, by chip.set('unit', 'power', 'uw') (https://docs.siliconcompiler.com/en/latest/reference_manual/schema.html#param-unit-power-ref)

[suhanimitra]

I had a clocked defined using chip.clock('clk', period=1000) in my python file. I also tried rerunning my file after changing the units of power using chip.set('unit', 'power', 'uw'), but am still getting the same power values as I initially did. I'm not sure if the unit change is working though, as the HTML file still shows the units as "mw". This is what my python file looks like:

[gadfort]

I'm sorry, I was wrong, I meant to set the units for the metric itself.
chip.set('metric', 'power', 'uw', field='unit')

The units you are setting currently do not effect anything.
For asap7, a clock period of 1000ns is very large which will also contribute to the low power. You may want to consider lowering that some.

[suhanimitra]

No worries!

I tried running it again, with chip.set('metric', 'peakpower', 'uw', field='unit') and a lower period of 100, but am only getting values of ~0.031 uw which is still quite small. Is there anything else that could be causing these power values to be so low?

[gadfort]

Without knowing what the design is it's hard to estimate if the power numbers are off. Certainly running a 7nm process as 10MHz will power your power