Cycle-Accurate Simulation of Energy Consumption in Embedded Systems

This paper presents a methodology for cycle-accurate simulation of energy dissipation in embedded systems. The ARM Ltd. [1] instruction-level cycle-accurate simulator is extended with energy models for the processor, the L2 cache, the memory, the interconnect and the DC-DC converter. A SmartBadge, which can be seen as an embedded system consisting of StrongARM-1100 processor, memory and the DCDC converter, is used to evaluate the methodology with the Dhrystone benchmark. We compared performance and energy computed by our simulator with measurements in hardware and found them in agreement within a 5% tolerance. The simulation methodology was applied to design exploration for enhancing a SmartBadge with real-time MPEG feature