Fast, flexible, cycle-accurate energy estimation

Designing energy efficient hardware and software systems demands different tools at various levels in the design hierarchy. There is however a dearth of tools to enable investigation and implementation of energy efficient software and hardware architectures. Presented is a fast, flexible, cycle-accurate architectural simulator, Myrmigki, that models a commercial microcontroller and microprocessor family, and enables cycle-accurate power dissipation analyses through a combination of instruction level power analysis and circuit activity estimation. Myrmigki is intended to be used to study the effect of microarchitectural features on the energy efficiency of hardware and software systems. It provides facilities for dynamic voltage scaling, clock speed setting and per-cycle architecture reconfiguration, and is easily extended to add new microarchitectural features and model new instruction set architectures. The simulator provides over an order of magnitude speedup over a contemporary state-of-the-art power estimating simulator, while providing estimates within 10% of measurements from prototype hardware that it models.