Cycle-accurate energy consumption measurement and analysis

We introduce an energy consumption analysis of complex digital systems through a case study of ARM7TDMI RISC processor by using a new energy measurement technique. We developed a cycle-accurate energy consumption measurement system based on charge transfer which is robust to spiky noise and is capable of collecting a range of power consumption profiles in real time. The relative energy variation of the RISC core is measured by changing the opcode, the instruction fetch address, the register number, in each pipeline stage, respectively. We demonstrated energy characterization of a pipelined RISC processor for high-level power reduction.