TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter presents a methodology and a set of models supporting energy-driven source-to-source transformations. The most promising code transformation techniques have been identified and studied leading to accurate analytical and/or statistical models. Experimental results obtained for some common embedded-system processors over a set of typical benchmarks are discussed, showing the value of the proposed approach as a support tool for embedded software design.
Keywords: Software optimization, Power optimization, Source-level modeling
In a growing number of complex heterogeneous embedded systems the relevance of the software component is rapidly increasing. Issues such as development time, flexibility and reusability are, in fact, better addressed by software based solutions. Another trend that is significantly pushing designers to move as much functionality as possible toward software is the increased interest in platform-based designs. In such systems much of the architecture is fixed and can only be configured to match the design constraints. The greatest part of the application-specific functionality is thus naturally shifted from hardware dedicated components to software programs. In such a scenario it is clear that the importance of software is steadily increasing and poses new problems to designers. Though performance, in the sense of computational efficiency, is still the foremost requirement for many embedded systems, power consumption is gaining more and more attention. Optimization of the code is thus one of the key points and is currently addressed almost only by means of compilation techniques. It is still not...
