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SystemC-Based Power Evaluation with PowerSC

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Electronic System Level Design

Abstract

Although SystemC is considered the most promising language for SoC functional modeling, it does not come with built-in power modeling capabilities. This chapter presents PowerSC, a power estimation framework which instruments SystemC for power characterization, modeling and estimation. Since it is entirely based on SystemC, PowerSC allows consistent power modeling from ESL to lower abstraction levels. Section 8.1 shows how SystemC is extended to handle power, Sect. 8.2 describes how to instrument SystemC descriptions for power estimation, Sect. 8.3 illustrates how PowerSC allows the user to perform estimations either at RTL or gate-level with the same instrumentation. Finally, Sect. 8.4 explains how to put PowerSC to work.

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Correspondence to Felipe Klein .

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

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Klein, F., Azevedo, R., Santos, L., Araujo, G. (2011). SystemC-Based Power Evaluation with PowerSC. In: Rigo, S., Azevedo, R., Santos, L. (eds) Electronic System Level Design. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9940-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9940-3_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-9939-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-9940-3

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