Energy-efficient design of battery-powered embedded systems

Energy-efficient design of battery-powered systems demands optimizations in both hardware and software. We present a modular approach for enhancing in struction level simulators with cycle-accurate simulation of energy dissipa tion in embedded systems. Our methodology has tightly coupled component mod els thus making our approach more accurate. Performance and energy computed by our simulator are within a 5% tolerance of hardware measurements on the SmartBadge [2]. We show how the simulation methodology can be used for har dware design exploration aimed at enhancing the SmartBadge with real-time M PEG video feature, In addition, we present a profiler that relates energy c onsumption to the source code. Using the profiler we can quickly and easily redesign the MP3 audio decoder software to run in real time on the SmartBa dge with low energy consumption. Performance increase of 92% and energy con sumption decrease of 77% over the original executable specification have be en achieved.