trace2power

Copyright (c) 2024-2025 Antmicro

trace2power is a tool that can read VCD and FST signal traces and extract accumulated power activity data for use with power analysis tools.

The tool can export the data into two distinct formats:

• tcl - a Tcl procedure containing calls for setting power activity data in OpenSTA. This was the original intended usage and it allows significantly faster trace processing than loading VCDs directly to OpenSTA using read_vcd.
• saif - A "Backwards SAIF" file (IEEE 1801-2018 (Annex I.3)). This format should be compatible with more tools.

trace2power can also optimize out irrelevant signals or scopes. Those optimizations will usually require providing a netlst file generated with Yosys.

Building

Note that trace2power requires rustc 1.80.1 or newer.

This is a standard cargo package. Cargo comes bundled with the standard Rust installation: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.

You can build the app and install it using

cargo install --path .

or just build the binary:

cargo build --release

The binary will be located at target/release/trace2power

Usage

trace2power [OPTIONS] --clk-freq <CLK_FREQ> <INPUT_FILE>

Run trace2power --help for detailed descriptions of available options.

Examples

Check out the examples README for instructions for running test examples and for a description of a flow used to test trace2power.