Low-energy asynchronous memory design

Abstract

We introduce the concept of energy per operation as a measure of performance of an asynchronous circuit. We show how to model energy consumption based on the high-level language specification. This model is independent of voltage and timing considerations. We apply this model to memory design. We show first how to dimension a memory array, and how to break up this memory array into smaller arrays to minimize the energy per access. We then show how to use cache memory and pre-fetch mechanisms to further reduce energy per access.