Estimating Energy and Power Consumption in PULP

[Adi]

Hi,

If I want to estimate the energy and power consumption of a specific software which is run on PULP (let's say PULPino, PULPissimo or bigPULP) with an HWPE that I added, what is the proper way of doing it?
In addition, is there a way of estimating the area?

Thanks!
Adi

[akurth]

Hi Adi,

What technology are you targeting? FPGAs (which series)? ASICs (which fab and node)? In any case, you need to either extract switching activities from a post-implementation simulation and put that together with the post-implementation netlist and libraries into a power simulator or, more accurately, measure a silicon implementation. FPGA vendors provide guides on how to do that with certain development boards, and on an ASIC you would measure current consumption on an IC tester and/or a dev board. Make sure you put components you want to measure separately into separate power domains and supply them through separate pins. Those are the essentials, I think ..

Best,
Andreas