Cycle-accurate energy consumption measurement and analysis: Case study of ARM7TDMI

Abstract

We introduce an energy consumption analysis of complex digital systems through a case study of ARM7TDMI RISC processor by using a new energy measurement technique. We developed a cycle-accurate energy consumption measurement system based on charge transfer which is robust to spiky noise and is capable of collecting a range of power consumption profiles in real time. The relative energy variation of the RISC core is measured by changing the op-code, the instruction fetch address, the register number, the register value, the data fetch address, and the immediate operand value in each pipeline stage, respectively. We demonstrated energy characterization of a pipelined RISC processor for high-level power reduction.