Microprocessor power analysis by labeled simulation
Cheng-Ta Hsieh, Lung-Sheng Chen, Massoud Pedram · 2001
In many applications, it is important to know how power is consumed while software is being executed on the target processor. Instruction-level power microanalysis, which is a cycle-accurate simulation technique based on instruction label generation and propagation, is aimed at answering this question for superscalar and pipelined processors. This technique requires the micro-architectural details of the CPU and provides the power consumption of every module (or gate) for each active instruction in each cycle. To validate this approach, a Zilog 16-bit digital signal processor (DSP) core was designed by using a 0.25µ TSMC cell library, and the power consumption per instruction was collected using a Verilog simulator specially written for the DSP core. 1