A Precise High-Level Power Consumption Model for Embedded Systems Software
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Research Article A Precise High-Level Power Consumption Model for Embedded Systems Software Mostafa E. A. Ibrahim,1, 2 Markus Rupp (EURASIP Member),2 and Hossam A. H. Fahmy3 1 Electrical
Engineering Department, High Institute of Technology, Benha University, 13512 Benha, Egypt of Communications and RF Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, 1040 Vienna, Austria 3 Electronics and Communication Department, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, 12613 Cairo, Egypt 2 Institute
Correspondence should be addressed to Mostafa E. A. Ibrahim, [email protected] Received 26 February 2010; Revised 17 June 2010; Accepted 11 August 2010 Academic Editor: Xiaorui Wang Copyright © 2011 Mostafa E. A. Ibrahim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The increasing demand for portable computing has elevated power consumption to be one of the most critical embedded systems design parameters. In this paper, we present a precise high-level power estimation methodology for the software loaded on a VLIW processor that is based on a functional level power model. The targeted processor of our approach is the TMS320C6416T DSP from Texas Instrument. We consider several important issues in our model such as the pipeline stall, inter-instructions effect and cache misses. The contributions are the following. First, a precise model to estimate the power consumption of the targeted DSP, while running a software algorithm is proposed. Second, we prove the validation and precision of our model on many typical algorithms applied in signal and image processing. Third, we further validate the precision of our model on a real application applied in the video processing field. The power consumption estimated by our model is compared to the physically measured power consumption, achieving a very low average absolute estimation error of 1.65% and a maximum absolute estimation error of only 3.3%.
1. Introduction Many applications in special areas such as hand-held computation, tiny robots, and guidance systems in automated vehicles are powered by batteries of low rating. In order to avoid frequent recharging or replacement of the batteries, there is a significant interest in low-power system design. Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) Digital Signal Processors (DSP) are the most worthy choice for such an application domain because of their optimal performance at low power. The importance of the power constraints during the design of embedded systems has continuously increased in the past years, due to technological trends toward high-level integration and increasing operating frequencies, combined with the growing demand of portable systems. This has led to a significant research effort in power estimation and low power design. Power simulators (profilers) allow the software programmers to specify the hot spot, highly power consuming, segments of their software code a
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