Efficient High-Level Power Estimation for Multi-standard Wireless Systems

This paper aims at providing a new system level power estimation methodology based on transaction level modelling (SystemC) for wireless applications, which can highly improve the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency of power estimation in system level. The main features of our novel simulation environment for SystemC will be presented, which allows the easy introduction of a power model in the executable specification of a sophisticated wireless design. It allows efficient power estimation of reconfigurable cores by state based power modelling, which leads to a viable solution for early power aware design of multi-standard wireless systems. The simulator has been applied to the SystemC modules of a WiMAX receiver based on ARM processor, reconfigurable FFT and Viterbi, and AMBA bus. The power figures have been compared with the results obtained from industrial tools.