Energy Consumption Estimation for Embedded Applications

Energy consumption, indeed, represents one of the essential properties of embedded applications, especially for those devices whose autonomy depends on battery life. The lack of accurate and suitable methodology for energy consumption estimation for embedded applications based on ultra-low power heterogeneous multicore DSP platforms inspired a solution that will be presented in this paper. The solution has been developed as a plugin for the Eclipse based MIDE (Multicore Integrated Development Environment), in order to facilitate production of energy efficient firmware solutions. Evaluation of energy loss has been calculated using instruction-level power analysis, virtual platform, debug information, and diverse input loads. The primary goal was to obtain a precise model of energy consumption that will establish a direct link between program solutions and the amount of energy required for their execution, whilst processing different input loads. Estimation has been validated against empirical data, measured on a real DSP platform.Results show that very high accuracy has been reached