Instruction Level Energy Consumption Estimation of Embedded Processor

Abstract

Embedded systems are portable battery powered devices that have limited power resource. Hence, most of embedded systems need to meet energy constraint. Performance and energy consumption are the most important metrics for embedded system design. Estimation of performance, energy utilization and its validation are essential for embedded system design. Attempt has been made to precisely measure software energy consumption by three methods on ARM Cortex M4 processor. The results are validated with five benchmark programs. Tedious calculation of inter instruction cost has been minimized by taking it as certain percent of total energy. Percentage error between actual and estimated energy is found to be less than 5%.