Energy has become a critical issue in processor design, especially in embedded environments. Thus, there is a need for tools, which provide an accurate and fast estimation of energy.  In this paper, we present the design and use of a tool, Virtual Energy Counters (vEC), for estimating the energy consumption of user programs. vEC is built on top of the Perfmon user library for the UltraSPARC platform, and provides a user interface, which can be used within user programs to estimate the energy consumption. The energy estimates are provided for those consumed in the data, instruction and extended caches, main memory, address bus, data bus, address pads, and data pads.
['Ismail Kadayif', 'T. Chinoda', 'M. Kandemir', 'N. Vijaykirsnan', 'Mary Jane Irwin', 'Anand Sivasubramaniam']
vEC: virtual energy counters