PISCATAWAY, N.J., 20 March 2009. The IEEE in Piscataway, N.J., has approved the IEEE 1801 electronic industry standard that provides portability of low power design specifications for use throughout an electronic system design, analysis, verification, and implementation flow.

The standard, also known as Unified Power Format (UPF) 2.0. UPF, was first developed by Accellera in Napa, Calif.

"The working group approval of IEEE P1801 expands the capabilities of UPF while providing interoperability and portability to low power design flows and data," says Stephen Bailey, chair of the P1801 working group. "This version enhances portability by addressing bugs and ambiguities in the UPF 1.0 specification and also delivers functionality requested by the community of low-power designers."

Enhancements to UPF in the standard include support for bias supplies (N-well, P-well, Deep-N-Well and Deep-P-Well); greater flexibility and capabilities in specification of power states; and enhanced semantic capabilities for merged power domains.

"The standard also includes a high level of backward compatibility," says Gary Delp, working group vice-chair. "The use of UPF throughout industry has increased over the last year, and we wanted to make sure that everyone could take advantage of enhancements without experiencing undue expense."

IEEE 1801 was sponsored by Design Automation Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group.

For more information contact the IEEE online at www.ieee.org.