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 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 DC-DC converter, is used to evaluate the methodology with the Dhrystone benchmark. The authors compared performance and energy computed by the simulator with measurements in hard ware and found them in agreement within a 5% tolerance. The simulation methodology was applied to design exploration for enhancing a SmartBadge with realtime MPEG feature.