Hybrid system level power consumption estimation for FPGA-based MPSoC

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient Hybrid System Level (HSL) power estimation methodology for FPGA-based MPSoC. Within this methodology, the Functional Level Power Analysis (FLPA) is extended to set up generic power models for the different parts of the system. Then, a simulation framework is developed at the transactional level to evaluate accurately the activities used in the related power models. The combination of the above two parts lead to a hybrid power estimation that gives a better trade-off between accuracy and speed. The proposed methodology has several benefits: it considers the power consumption of the embedded system in its entirety and leads to accurate estimates without a costly and complex material. The proposed methodology is also scalable for exploring complex embedded architectures. The usefulness and effectiveness of our HSL methodology is validated through a typical mono-processor and multiprocessor embedded system designed around the Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA board. Our experiments performed on an explicit embedded platform show that the obtained power estimation results are less than 1.2% of error when compared to the real board measurements and faster compared to other power estimation tools.