A framework for estimating and minimizing energy dissipation of embedded HW/SW systems

Embedded system design is one of the most challenging tasks in VLSI CAD because of the vast amount of system parameters to fix and the great variety of constraints to meet. In this paper we focus on the constraint of low energy dissipation, an indispensable peculiarity of embedded mobile computing systems. We present the first comprehensive framework that simultaneously evaluates the tradeoffs of energy dissipations of software and hardware such as caches and main memory. Unlike previous work in low power research which focused only on software or hardware, our framework optimizes system parameters to minimize energy dissipation of the overall system. The trade-off between system performance and energy dissipation is also explored. Experimental results show that our Avalanche framework can drastically reduce system energy dissipation.