Well, it happened again. Just when you were about to beat the high score of your favorite game your portable game console powers down because of an empty battery! Design for low-power has become a crucial issue for modern consumer products like portable game consoles, mobile phones and video receivers, MP3 players and multimedia personal digital assistants (PDA). “Standby Time” can easily become the differentiating product feature for a mobile consumer product. But design for low-power is much more far reaching then in mobile applications. Even in wall outlet operated devices like video recorders, DVD players and computers the energy consumption has a profound impact on the cost of the end product. With less power consumption design teams can choose more basic, less expensive packaging and cooling mechanisms.

This white paper will explore the typical distribution of energy consumption in a typical consumer device and introduce the main sources for power consumption We will review different abstraction levels at which energy consumption can be measured or estimated and then introduce common techniques to optimize a design for low power at the pre-RT Level. We will present measurements of the impact these techniques can have on energy consumption using the example of a JPEG Decoder. We will close with a brief summary and assessment which accuracy of energy estimation can be achieved at the pre RT Level