Instruction Level Energy Estimation of 8051 Microcontroller

Abstract: Estimation of the energy consumed in battery powered applications is crucial factor in optimizing energy consumption of embedded systems. This paper proposes simple instruction level energy estimation for 8051 microcontroller based system for undergraduate level students. Energy estimation is very much important for any embedded system operating on battery. The measurement of the power associated with each instruction is carried out. Once the power cost of each instruction is known, energy consumed for any program can be easily calculated and various power saving methods can be adopted. An attempt is made in this paper to actually measure energy cost of each instruction of 8051 (P89LV51RD2) based system.

Keywords: Current measurement, embedded system, power estimation, software energy estimation.