Power Consumption and Performance’s Library on DSPs: Case Study MPEG2

Abstract

The growing demand for portable electronic devices has led to an increased emphasis on power consumption within the semiconductor industry. As a result, designers are now encouraged to consider the impact of their decisions not only on speed and area, but also on power throughout the design space exploration. This article presents a high-level design space exploration methodology. It allows characterising a software application computing on TI-DSPs. The proposed approach exploits parametric models representing the consumption’s behaviour of both DSP’s architecture and algorithm. This consists in releasing the laws of consumption on a high level. This approach makes it possible to deduce the power and the energy consumption of a code in an advanced language for a given target. Feasibility and the interest of the approach were proved using MPEG2. This new approach was based on a functional level power analysis. The advantage of this approach was that the consumption and performance estimation can be made at a high level. Moreover, the proposed approach gives a detailed function-level characterization of the energy behaviour of application, enabling estimation of software energy consumption.