irsim and power estimation

[Tuukka Toivonen]

Irsim 9.5 contains code to do power estimation from the
toggle counts of a circuit.

Both the delay of a transistor and the switched power
depends mostly on the capacitance of a node. 

This capacitance comes from two things, the transistor
gate capacitance and the wire capacitance that connects
it to the next transistor.

I have a schematic-level circuit created in Electric,
I write an IRSIM simulation deck and simulate.

The question is, how well does this capacitance (and
thus circuit delays and consumed power) match
with an equivalent real circuit? Certainly it will not be exact, since
there won't be place-and-route information. But how much it will
be off?

Can I set a wire capacitance (Tools/Logical Effort/
Set Arc Capacitance) so that it gets written in to the
IRSIM simulation file, or is that just for the
Logical Effort tool?

If I do have layout-level circuit, from which I create
an IRSIM simulation file, it will be more accurate, right?

And still one question: is there more appropriate/lively
place to discuss about VLSI design? This mailing list
is very quiet and I looked from newsgroups *.electronics.*
but those have slightly different topic. Then there is
comp.lsi.*. Anything else?