Signal strength based switching activity modeling and estimation for DSP applications

We present an effective switching activity modeling and estimation techniqu e for components under resource sharing, The model uses word-level signal s tatistics to generate a single parameter, called signal strength. By using the signal strength, we can construct power models for the both cases of sh aring and non-sharing of computing resources, The model enables us to effec tively estimate switching activity at higher level of design abstraction, W e have conducted several experiments using both synthetic and real data to evaluate our method. We have compared competing architectures for their rel ative power consumption for different components. The results show that ave rage difference between the proposed method and very accurate power simulat ion (as opposed to switching estimation) using PowerMill is up to 12%.