A low power embedded dataflow coprocessor

Abstract

Power consumption has become one of the most important concerns in microprocessor design. However, the potential for further power-saving in microprocessors with a conventional architecture is limited because of their unified architectures and mature low-power techniques. An alternative way is proposed in this paper to save power - embedding a dataflow coprocessor in a conventional RISC processor. The dataflow coprocessor is designed to execute short code segments very efficiently. The primary experimental results show that the dataflow coprocessor can increase the power efficiency of a RISC processor by an order of magnitude.