POWER ESTIMATION OF EMBEDDED SYSTEMS - A HARDWARE SOFTWARE CODESIGN APPROACH/

The need for low-power embedded systems has become very significant wi thin the microelectronics scenario in the most recent years. A power-d riven methodology is mandatory during embedded systems design to meet system-level requirements while fulfilling time-to-market. The aim of this paper is to introduce accurate and efficient power metrics includ ed in a hardware/software (HW/SW) codesign environment to guide the sy stem-level partitioning. Power evaluation metrics have been defined to widely explore the architectural design space at high abstraction lev el. This is one of the first approaches that considers globally HW and SW contributions to power in a system-level design how for control do minated embedded systems.