Signal strength based switching activity modeling and estimation for DSP applications

Abstract

We present an effective switching activity modeling and estimation technique for components under resource sharing. The model uses word-level signal statistics to generate a single parameter, called signal strength. By using the signal strength, we can construct power models for the both cases of sharing and non-sharing of computing resources. The model enables us to effectively estimate switching activity at higher level of design abstraction. We have conducted several experiments using both synthetic and real data to evaluate our method. We have compared competing architectures for their relative power consumption for different components. The results show that average difference between the proposed method and very accurate power simulation (as opposed to switching estimation) using PowerMill is up to 12%.