ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between software and power. It provides an in-depth review of experimental setups for measuring current of processors. The chapter also discusses predictive models of average power. It presents research in building instruction-level instantaneous power models of embedded processors and applications of instantaneous power modeling to security, respectively. J. Russell and M. Jacome measured instantaneous power of individual instructions across one loop iteration and used this in an instruction-level average-power model. The application, where power is being modeled, is divided into blocks where the average instruction parallelism per block and variation of parallelism is used to create multiplicative factors. These factors correct for block-to-block current variation at the higher application software level. The measurement of instantaneous power while a processor is executing an application has been used in power-attacks of cryptographic devices, such as smart cards.
