Abstract
Low power register file design plays an important role in an embedded processor. In this paper, we exploit register-usage in a program to find out unused registers, and turn these unused registers into low power mode by annotating power-controlling instructions. The whole work is performed by applying the hardware/software co-design principle. For the hardware part, we propose a voltage-scaling control logic to supply voltages for each register. For the software part, we propose a power-controlling-code annotation approach to determine the voltage scaling behavior for each register. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms the other related approaches in terms of the energy-delay product.
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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Shieh, WY., Chen, CC. (2005). Exploiting Register-Usage for Saving Register-File Energy in Embedded Processors. In: Yang, L.T., Amamiya, M., Liu, Z., Guo, M., Rammig, F.J. (eds) Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing – EUC 2005. EUC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3824. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11596356_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11596356_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30807-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32295-5
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