| Nowadays, power consumption is a key constraint and a digital system design essential metric of performance. Excessive heat dissipation of integrated circuits relatively decreases the performance of the system. Also, more than ever, we need to increase the battery lifetime of new portable electronics. With classical design techniques as RTL " Register Transfer Level ", precise power estimation is only possible in the final stages of the development process. To solve this problem, the literature recently proposed to raise the abstraction level of embedded systems design, using ESL " Electronic System Level " methodology. In this context, this project proposes a methodology to automatically characterize configurable soft-processors power consumption and generate an effective power model for energy consumption estimation at system level. Using this model, a comparative study between three estimation techniques is also presented. The results of five benchmarks show that our power estimation is eight thousand times faster than conventional estimation techniques and an average error of only +/-3.98 % for the LEON3 processor and +/-10.70 % for the Microblaze processor. |
