Over the last years, power has became a primary consideration in hardware design, and it is critical in computer systems especially for portable devices where the batteries should last long before they need to be replaced or recharged. Starting from this consideration the paper presents a model for estimation of power consumption of an 8-bit microcontroller early in the design cycle of embedded software. The tool analyses the assembly code being executed and provides an estimate of its average power consumption.

Power Extractor is a Perl/Tk based automatic test environment. It grew out from the need to construct automatic tests at system level that could send commands to a Device Under Test (DUT) and get responses from the DUT. Perl/Tk was chosen as the basis for this automatic test environment because of the wealth and maturity of its "language" features, as well as its ease of extensibility.

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