C-LANGUAGE SOURCE-LEVEL POWER CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION AND OPTIMIZATION FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Thanks to the wide diffusion of personal communication, computing and entertainment devices, the market of portable, battery-powered, embedded systems is quick expanding, emphasizing the importance of energy consumption estimation and optimization techniques. Current circuit-level and gate-level estimation techniques are accurate, but computationally extremely demanding, and too fine-grained to provide results useful for the system-level design. In the mid of 90’s, a new research thread was born, now coming to maturity, whose goal was to achieve energy consumption estimation at the instructionlevel: estimation flows based upon these methodologies are now mature products, which provide accurate and reliable results. The objective of our research is to step on towards the next abstraction level, more precisely, we desire to achieve methodologies to estimate the energy consumption at the source code level (e.g., C language source code); moreover, w