The efficiency of power supply circuits such as DC-DC converters and batteries varies on the trend of the power consumption because their efficiencies are not fixed. To analyze the efficiency of power supply circuits, we need the temporal behavior of the power consumption of the loads, which is dependent on the activity factors of the devices during the operation. Since it is not easy to model every detail of those factors, one of the most accurate power consumption analyses of power supply circuits is measurement of a real system, which is expensive and time consuming. In this paper, we introduce an active load emulator for embedded systems which is capable of power measurement, logging, replaying and synthesis. We adopt a pattern recognition technique for data compression in that long-term behaviors of power consumption consist of numbers of repetitions of short-term behaviors, and the number of short-term behaviors is generally limited to a small number. We also devise a heterogeneous structure of active load elements so that low-speed, high-current active load elements and high-speed, low-current active load elements may emulate large amount and fast changing power consumption of digital systems. For the performance evaluation of our load emulator, we demonstrate power measurement and emulation of a hard drive. As an application of our load emulator, it is used for the analysis of a DC-DC converter efficiency and for the verification of a low-power frequency scaling policy for a real-time task.