J4CS: An Early-Stage Statement-Level Metric for Energy Consumption of Embedded SW

Abstract

This work presents an early-stage statement-level metric for energy consumption of embedded SW. In particular, based on an existing assembly-level analysis and some profiling activities performed on a given C benchmark, it defines a metric related to the average energy consumption of a generic C statement for a given target processor. Such a metric, evaluated with a one-time effort, can be then used to rapidly estimate the energy consumption of a given C function for all the characterized processors. Two reference embedded processors are then considered in order to show an example of usage of the proposed metric.