asic and MATLAB
What is your purpuse to estimate power in MATLAB? If you want to get algorithm power consumption, you can use algorithm model is fine. Personally, I think matlab give us good algorithm platform, but not good for hardware design. You can statis all multipler and adder in your algorithm model. And monitor the input changes, you can give a relative reference of the model. It is not a absolutive value for power. And it can give you a quick view of hardware resources.
Perl program is fine for statistic.