FILESPPA: Fast Instruction Level Embedded System Power and Performance Analyzer

Abstract

In the low power embedded systems design, it is important to analyze and optimize both the hardware and the software components of the system. The power consumption evaluation of the embedded systems is very slow procedure using the instruction-level power models into the simulator. Moreover, a huge number of simulations are needed to explore the power consumption in the instruction memory hierarchy to find the best cache parameters of each hierarchy’s level. In this paper we present a methodology which is aiming to estimate the system power consumption in short time, without simulation. The proposed methodology is based on the fast instruction analysis using instruction level power models, cache memory and memory power models. Based on the proposed methodology a software tool was developed named FILESPPA in order to automate the methodology’s steps for the MIPS processor architectures. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed methodology and tool in term of estimation accuracy, reducing the system power estimation time of the simulation technique.