An Energy Characterization Framework for Software-Based Embedded Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes an energy characterization framework which helps designers in developing a fast and accurate energy model for a target processor-based system. We use a linear model for energy estimation and we find the coefficients of the model using linear programming (LP). We use our approach for estimating the energy consumption of two commercial microprocessors with their on-chip caches and an off-chip SDRAM. Experimental results demonstrate that the error of our technique is on an average 3% and worst case 16% compared to the gate-level estimation results. Once the model has been developed, the energy consumption of an application program can be estimated with the speed of 300,000 instructions per second