Measurement of Power Consumption in Digital Systems

A study on measurement configurations for the estimation of power consumption of processing systems is presented in this work. The problem addressed is to measure the energy that a digital system consumes for a numerous number of clock cycles and to assign this consumption to a specific group of instructions. This kind of energy measurement provides the information for determining the energy consumption of specific software routines that run on digital processing systems. The proposed configuration may be integrated in the same chip as a peripheral unit, which will monitor the energy consumption during the different tasks of operation. It is expected to provide clear information of the power behavior of single-chip processing systems for low-power applications, as well as for built-in self test purposes