A POWER AWARE SYSTEM-LEVEL DESIGN SPACE EXPLORATION FRAMEWORK

Abstract. More than ever, design methodologies for embedded systems need to support design space exploration in order to experiment with various po-tential HW/SW solutions. Our exploration tool, "Design Trotter", has been designed to evaluate area (A) and time (T) parameters of generic ASIC architectures. However, since exibility and energy (E) have become impor-tant parameters, we propose in this paper an extension which allows (A,T,E) exploration of programmable processors. Our method, "HW/SW cost esti-mation", employs power related information from the target technology, thus providing the salient feature of estimating energy consumption of software executing on xed or application specic architectures.