A co-processor for real-time energy estimation of system-on-a-chip

As mobile electronic devices become increasingly important in everyday life, advanced technologies are necessary to meet the constraints on low energy consumption and power aware system design. In this work, a co-processor is presented, delivering the energy consumption of a system-on-a-chip (SOC) design in real-time. The co-processor is based on power macro-modeling, making any analog measurement equipment obsolete to the software developer after the SOC is characterized once. Therefore, the coprocessor allows quick and easy energy estimations of software running on a SOC. The results show that the relative error of the energy estimations is <5%.