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Abstract: Energy-aware compilers are becoming increasingly important for embedded systems due to the need to meet a variety of design constraints on time, code size and power consumption. This paper introduces for the first time a trace-based, link-time compiler framework on binaries for embedded systems and evaluates its potential benefits in supporting energy optimisations, especially those that exploit the interaction between compilers and architecture. We present two algorithms for reducing leakage energy in functional units and data caches, respectively. Both algorithms work uniformly at the granularity of optimisation regions that are formed by the hot traces of a program. Our experimental results using Mediabench benchmarks show that good leakage energy savings can be achieved at the cost of some small performance and code size penalties. Furthermore, by varying the granularity of optimisation regions, which is a tunable parameter, embedded application programmers can make the tradeoffs between energy savings and these associated costs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]