Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4917

COFFEE: COmpiler Framework for Energy-Aware Exploration 207
different interesting explorations which the designer may want to perform during the
early phase of the design process. It can be clearly seen that for various architecturecompiler
co-exploration, the proposed tools are quite user friendly. Even for a large
exploration task like finding an optimal architecture by balancing ILP-DLP for a given
application, only the machine description and the ISA description needs to be modified
and the rest of the flow is fully automatic.
6 Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper we presented a framework to perform energy-aware architecture exploration.
The proposed framework provides all the necessary low power architecture features
to optimize processors for handheld embedded systems. We illustrated this by
modeling and compiling a representative wireless communication application
(WCDMA) on two state of the art processors (including the instruction memory and
data memory). We validated the accuracy of our energy estimation compared to detailed
gate level simulations, using an in-house processor design. We have also shown
that the proposed framework is capable of compiling, simulating, and estimating energy
for a wide range of architectures and advanced low power architectural features. In the
future we plan perform architecture exploration for Software Defined Radio using the
COFFEE framework.
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