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Instruction Fetch Energy Reduction with Biased SRAMs

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Abstract

Especially in programmable processors, energy consumption of integrated memories can become a limiting design factor due to thermal dissipation power constraints and limited battery capacity. Consequently, contemporary improvement efforts on memory technologies are focusing more on the energy-efficiency aspects, which has resulted in biased CMOS SRAM cells that increase energy efficiency by favoring one logical value over another. In this paper, xor-masking, a method for exploiting such contemporary low power SRAM memories is proposed to improve the energy-efficiency of instruction fetching. Xor-masking utilizes static program analysis statistics to produce optimal encoding masks to reduce the occurrence of the more energy consuming instruction bit values in the fetched instructions. The method is evaluated on LatticeMico32, a small RISC core popular in ultra low power designs, and on a wide instruction word high performance low power DSP. Compared to the previous “bus invert” technique typically used with similar SRAMs, the proposed method reduces instruction read energy consumption of the LatticeMico32 by up to 13% and 38% on the DSP core.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the TUT Graduate School, Academy of Finland (project PLC), Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (project ”Parallel Acceleration 3”, funding decision 1134/31/2015), and ARTEMIS JU under grant agreement no 621439 (ALMARVI).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Customized Parallel Computing Group, Laboratory of Pervasive Computing, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Joonas Multanen, Timo Viitanen, Pekka Jääskeläinen & Jarmo Takala

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  1. Joonas Multanen
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  2. Timo Viitanen
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  3. Pekka Jääskeläinen
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  4. Jarmo Takala
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Correspondence to Joonas Multanen.

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Multanen, J., Viitanen, T., Jääskeläinen, P. et al. Instruction Fetch Energy Reduction with Biased SRAMs. J Sign Process Syst 90, 1519–1532 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-018-1367-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-018-1367-6

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