trace2power

Copyright (c) 2024-2025 Antmicro

trace2power reads VCD and FST signal traces and extracts accumulated power activity data for use with power analysis tools.

The tool can export 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 netlist file generated with Yosys.

Building

trace2power requires Rust 1.80.1 or newer.

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.