Virtual platform for modeling the power consumption of a soft-core processor by the SystemC/TLM

Talking about complex applications is a nowadays topic, that require powerful and reliable tools to meet their performance goal. Thus, the use of multiprocessor systems on chip might be a solution to follow the growing complexity of these applications without degrading their performance; whereas this new generation of systems consumes more energy which leads to take the power as a critical metric in the design flow. To fulfill this challenge, different simulations based on virtual platforms power and energy estimation were done, but unfortunately they didn't focus on complex architectures by adding soft-core processors. The present paper proposes a methodology applied on an open virtual platform, the LIBTLMPWT (Library of Power and Temperature at the Transaction-Level-Modeling) in which all power and temperature computations are integrated into the SystemC/TLM model. This library simulates a minimal SoC model in which the Microblaze and the VGA controller are the main components. Firstly, we will implement power models at the SystemC/TLM level on the LIBTLMPWT, and then run different applications to evaluate accurately the activities used in the power models as a second step. This two steps lead to grab the software effect on the power consumption.