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Power is becoming a critical constraint for designing embedded applications. Current power analysis techniques based on circuit-level or architectural-level simulation are either impractical or inaccurate to estimate the power cost for a given piece of application software. In this paper, an instruction-level power analysis model is developed for an embedded digital signal processor (DSP) based on physical current measurements. Significant points of difference have been observed between the software power model for this custom DSP processor and the power models that have been developed earlier for some general purpose commercial microprocessors. In particular, the effect of circuit state on the power cost of an instruction stream is more marked in the case of this DSP processor. In addition, the processor has special architectural features that allow dual memory accesses and packing of instructions into pairs …