Abstract
The rapidly increasing complexity of the system-level design makes the design trend shifting from the RTL to the ESL. SystemC is one of the most important languages at ESL. However, SystemC does not support the power estimation which is a critical issue for the system-level design. In this paper, we present our ESL power estimation tool, called PowerDepot, which enhances SystemC with the capability for power estimation. The power models must be used in order to perform power estimation at ESL. However, embedding the power models into the ESL platform often encounters the abstraction, observability, and mapping issues which are introduced by the gap between ESL and other abstraction levels. The embedding procedure requiring the modifications to the original functions of the ESL modules is not only error-prone but also tedious. PowerDepot provides a solution which utilizes the pre-defined macros for the quick insertion of power models. We apply our methodology on the PAC Duo ESL platform, and the average error of the results is less than 2% with small simulation overhead. Besides, the results could be analyzed for architecture analysis.