Towards an Accurate High-Level Energy Model for LDPC Decoders

Estimating the energy consumption of LDPC decoders is a long and difficult task due to the large number of factors involved. Modern circuit synthesis tools can provide a satisfactory estimation of the power consumption, but this requires that the circuit be already implemented and it can take hours to provide the estimate. Currently, no accurate models are available to evaluate the decoding energy early in the design process. We propose a high-level energy model for flip-flop memory elements in LDPC architectures. The originality of the model is that it can analytically evaluate the variation of the energy due to the switching activity of the circuit gates, depending on the probability mass function (PMF) of the circuit inputs. Such PMFs are obtained through an adapted density evolution method that we propose. Therefore, the energy can be profiled for each decoding iteration and SNR value while considering several architecture choices. We illustrate the validity of the model by comparing the obtained energy estimates with measurements based on circuit simulations.