Optimizing for Low Power Consumption

[Christopher Wolff]

Greetings,

I'm working on a research project concerned with reducing the power 
consumption of programs running on embedded systems.  The m68hc11 is one 
of the chips we are working with.  I would like to modify gcc's backend 
for this target to select the instructions with the lowest cost in terms 
of power consumption.  It seems that this could be implemented using 
peephole optimization.

As someone who is unfamiliar with the internals of gcc, can anyone tell me 
what the scope of this project would be, and if it is a realistic goal for 
a short-term summer project?

Thanks in advance,
Christopher M. Wolff

Graduate Student
Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell