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Unified Power Format (UPF) has been an ever evolving standard started as a technical committee by the Accellera organization in 2006, producing the first revision of the UPF specification, UPF 1.0 in 2007. Soon after UPF 1.0 release the group reformed under the IEEE organization as IEEE1801 with a major goal of merging in a competing standard, the Common Power Format (CPF). IEEE 1801 has since released three new versions of the UPF specification over the past ten years: IEEE1801-2009 (UPF 2.0), IEEE1801-2013 (UPF 2.1) and IEEE1801-2015 (UPF 3.0).

UPF solves some unique problems in the design world. One is the lack of any need to consider power supplies in traditional digital design at the RTL level (or higher). Others cope with the desire to separate what is supported by an IP component from what is actually implemented on a given chip. From an IP developer’s view: How can I provide one functional description and let my user choose what power features to use and how to implement them? From a chip architect’s view: How can I describe the power structure on a chip without having to embed the architecture into every block of the functional description?

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