EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems Cover Image
Research Article
Open Access

Estimation of Power Consumption at Behavioral Modeling Level Using SystemC

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems20072007:068673

https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/68673

©  R. Damaševičius and V. Štuikys. 2007

Received: 22 May 2006

Accepted: 6 May 2007

Published: 14 June 2007

Abstract

A successful embedded system design requires thorough domain analysis and design space exploration. The aim is to develop a target system, which implements the prescribed functionality and at the same time meets the design, time, and cost-related constraints. The early evaluation of design characteristics, such as power consumption, allows the user to take advantage of many architectural design options available and to modify the system architecture, if needed. Currently, SystemC is used to model the hardware and software parts of a system at the high level. However, the characteristics of the modeled system are obtained only at the late design stages during physical synthesis. Here, we present a framework for power estimation at the modeling level of a design using macromodels. The SystemC class library is modified and extended with new classes describing the computation of power characteristics of the behavioral-level hardware models.

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Authors’ Affiliations

(1)
Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Informatics, Kaunas University of Technology

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Copyright

© R. Damaševičius and V. Štuikys. 2007

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.