Anticipatory access pipeline design for phased cache

Chih-Wen Hsueh, Jen-Feng Chung, Lan-Da Van, Chin-Teng Lin
2008 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems  
For an embedded processor, the cache design almost occupies half chip area and power consumption. According to Amdahl's law, if the power consumption of cache memories is reduced, the embedded processor can significantly save much power. However, the cache misses result in the penalty of thousands of cycles waiting and power consumption due to increasing the number of external memory access. Based on the above reason, the phased cache design is proposed and can largely improve the power
more » ... ion which wastes a set-associative cache. In this paper, the embedded pipelining processor without stalling and low-power phase cache is practiced with high-level simulation to achieve highperformance and low-power design. As experimental results, the proposed phase cache can reduce 44% power consumption compared with traditional one-access-cycle cache and eliminate pipeline stalls incurred by phased cache with only 6% gate count overhead.
doi:10.1109/iscas.2008.4541924 dblp:conf/iscas/HsuehCVL08 fatcat:b3ycadjctrbybdcuhy2dlnsayi