Early power-aware Design Space Exploration for embedded systems: MPEG-2 case study

Power consumption has become one of the major concerns in embedded systems design, especially for mobile devices, which integrate many applications leading to a high power consumption. In this context, designers have the challenge to identify power issues early in the design flow and to explore the largest possible space of power-efficient solutions. In this paper, we present a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach for early power-aware Design Space Exploration (DSE). This approach is based on a high-level modeling of power estimation and dynamic management aspects targeting an automatic generation of the corresponding simulation code. It was implemented in the DSE toolkit TTool by integrating power concepts in its DIPLODOCUS UML profile. The existing C++ simulation code generator was extended in order to integrate power estimation. The main objective of this article is to illustrate the potential of our approach through an MPEG-2 case study. The proposed high-level power modeling concepts were used to target two different platforms for the implementation of an MPEG-2 decoding application. The processor power estimates obtained from simulations were compared to real board measurements. This comparison showed that our MDE approach is capable of obtaining results that can be used to make early power-efficient design decisions.