Modeling the impact of process variations in worst-case energy consumption estimation

The advent of autonomous power-limited systems poses a new challenge for system verification. Powerful processors needed to enable autonomous operation, are typically power-hungry, jeopardizing battery duration. Therefore, guaranteeing a given battery duration requires worst-case energy consumption (WCEC) estimation for tasks running on those systems. Unfortunately, processor energy and power can suffer significant variation across different units due to process variation (PV), i.e. variability in the electrical properties of transistors and wires due to imperfect manufacturing, which challenges existing WCEC estimation methods for applications. In this paper, we propose a statistical modeling approach to capture PV impact on applications energy and a methodology to compute their WCEC capturing PV, as required to deploy portable critical devices.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773). MINECO partially supported Jaume Abella under Ramon y Cajal fellowship RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft