Energy-conscious HW/SW-partitioning of embedded systems: a case study on an MPEG-2 encoder

Energy dissipation is a hot topic in the design of- especially mobile-embedded systems. This is because applications like digital video cameras, cellular phones etc. draw their current from batteries that spend a limited amount of energy only. In this paper we show that energy-conscious HW/SW-partitioning can lead to drastic reductions of energy dissipation of a whole embedded system. Subject of investigation is an MPEG-2 encoder. Therefore, we introduce our framework for estimating and optimizing system energy as well as all conducted design steps. The obtained results show energy savings up 59% while the performance remains approximately the same or becomes even slightly higher. As a main result, energy-conscious HW/SW-partitioning is a promising method to be deployed in addition to classical energy and/or power reduction methods.