Power estimation for architectural exploration of HW/SW communication on system-level buses

The power consumption due to the HW/SW communication on system-level buses represents one of the major contributions to the overall power budget. A model to estimate the switching activity of the on-chip and off-chip buses at the system-level has been defined to evaluate the power dissipation and to compare the effectiveness of power optimization techniques. The paper aims at providing a framework for architectural exploration of a system design, focusing on the power consumption estimation of memory communication. Experimental results, conducted on bus streams generated by a real microprocessor and a stream generator, show how the variation of cache parameters and the introduction of bus encoding at the different levels on the memory hierarchy can affect the system power dissipation. Therefore, the proposed model can be effectively adopted to appropriately configure the memory hierarchy and the system bus architecture from the power standpoint.