A method for NoC-based MPSoC energy consumption estimation

NoC-based MPSoCs are well suited for applications requiring high performance while maintaining a low-power profile. Therefore, it is important to estimate the energy consumption at early stages of the design flow due to the limited power budget imposed by the batteries. State-of-the-art proposals estimate the energy due to the NoC or the processing elements. Few works address the energy modeling and estimation for a NoC-based MPSoCs. This paper presents a method to estimate the energy/power for NoCs and processors from an RTL description, applying the proposed method to an MPSoC (36 processing elements interconnected by a 2D-mesh NoC) executing 4 real applications controlled by a multi-task operating system. The paper presents a set of results, identifying the energy due to the applications, to each element of the system, as well as the effect of two low power strategies.