An environment for energy consumption analysis of cache memories in SoC platforms

Abstract

The tuning of cache architectures in platforms for embedded systems applications can dramatically reduce energy consumption. The existing cache exploration environments constrain the designer to analyze cache energy consumption on single processor systems and worse, systems that are based on a single processor type. In this paper is presented the PCacheEnergyAnalyzer environment for energy consumption analysis of cache memory on SoC platforms. This is a powerful energy analysis environment that combines the use of efficient tools to provide static and dynamic energy consumption analysis, the flexibility to support the architecture exploration of cache memories on platforms that are not bound to a specific processor, and fast simulation techniques. The proposed environment has been integrated into the SoC modeling framework PDesigner, providing a user-friendly graphical interface allowing the integrated modeling and cache energy analysis of SoCs. The PCacheEnergyAnalyzer has been validated with four applications of the Mediabench suite benchmark.