A framework for energy estimation of VLIW architecture

VLIW architectures are being increasingly used in mobile environments where energy-efficiency is an important consideration. The energy efficiency of the VLIW architecture is determined by the underlying hardware and compiler technologies. In order to support efficient exploration of the energy tradeoffs of different architectural configurations and compiler optimizations, this work presents a new energy-estimation framework built over the Trimaran VLIW toolset. We investigate the influence of both architectural and compiler optimizations on energy-efficiency using the proposed framework.