Architectural Low-Power Design Using Transaction-Based System Modeling and Simulation

Energy efficiency drives the development of more and more complex low-power designs. Based on dynamic power management techniques, multiple voltage islands as well as a huge amount of power states are specified that have to be tested carefully. In this context, low-power design should start at an early stage using state-of-the-art system-level modeling and simulation techniques. However, there is neither a programming language nor any modeling standard that reflects variable power together with its functional side effects in a well-suited abstract manner. To overcome this limitation, we present a modeling approach on top of SystemC TLM to capture low-power design characteristics at electronic system-level. We demonstrate the usability by means of an existing open-source low-power design. The experimental results show that appropriate TLM instrumentation cause only minimal simulation overhead, but offer sufficient details to identify common low-power design errors.