Efficient estimation of signal transition activity in MAC architectures

Because of the increasing demand of portable digital systems, it is of great interest to extend the existing high-level power estimation techniques to handle architectures with nonlinear components, as they appear in relevant practical applications. In this paper we focus on the estimation of the transition activity in MAC structures implementing FIR filters. Based on a divide and conquer approach, an accurate yet efficient estimation procedure is developed. The technique has been evaluated for different synthetic and real data sets. In all cases, our results depict only very slight discrepancies with respect to precise bit level simulations.