Towards fine grain power profiling tools for SoC based mobile devices

With the emergence of battery-constrained SoC devices dominated by smartphones and tablets, there is a need for very sophisticated fine-grained power profiling techniques, because one-tenth of a milliwatt of power can extend battery life by more than just a few hours. In this paper, we cover state-of-the-art power profiling devices on instrumented platforms and make the case that todays SoC devices require very fine and sophisticated power profiling tools to account for the SoCs exercised offloading mechanism of functionality to different IP blocks on the SoC.