CACO-PS: a general purpose cycle-accurate configurable power simulator

This paper presents a cycle-accurate and configurable simulator that estimates the power consumed by an embedded system. The simulator accepts as input a structural system architecture description, at a level of abstraction that can be configured by the user. The simulator has been used to study the power dissipation of different micro-architectures of a Java microcontroller while executing several applications. Thanks to the cycle-driven behavior and the structural system description, the simulator is both flexible and accurate, and it may also be fast, depending on the desired level of abstraction. It represents a valuable support in a design space exploration methodology, allowing a power consumption evaluation that can be applied to any processor and system architecture at an early design stage.