Patent ID: 7802241

Claim:
In an electronic device having a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor, a method for estimating energy usage of a program code executed by said processor, the program code including a plurality of instructions organized as groups of execution sets that execute substantially simultaneously, the method comprising: determining a no operation (NOP) energy for each execution set based on a position and length of the execution set, and number of cycles for executing the execution set; determining an incremental instruction energy of each instruction of each execution set based on predicated execution thereof; computing a base energy of each execution set by adding the NOP energy and the incremental instruction energy of the respective execution sets; computing an inter-execution set energy of each execution set based on a number of instruction changes in the execution set; determining the estimated energy usage of each execution set by adding the base energy and the inter-execution set energy thereof; and determining the estimated energy usage of the program code by adding the determined energies of all of the execution sets.