Modeling Power Consumption and Temperature in TLM Models

Many techniques and tools exist to estimate the power consumption and the temperature map of a chip. These tools help the hardware designers develop power efficient chips in the presence of temperature constraints. For this task, the application can be ignored or at least abstracted by some high level scenarios; at this stage, the actual embedded software is generally not available yet. However, after the hardware is defined, the embedded software can still have a significant influence on the power consumption; i.e., two implementations of the same application can consume more or less power. Moreover, the actual software power manager ensuring the temperature constraints, usually by acting dynamically on the voltage and frequency, must itself be validated. Validating such power management policy requires a model of both actuators and sensors, hence a closed-loop simulation of the functional model with a non-functional one. In this paper, we present and compare several tools to simulate the power and thermal behavior of a chip together with its functionality. We explore several levels of abstraction and study the impact on the precision of the analysis.