System-level power optimization of special purpose applications: the Beach Solution

Abstract

This paper describes a new approach to low-power bus encoding, called "The Beach Solution", which is thought for power optimization of digital systems containing an embedded processor or a microcontroller executing a special-purpose software routine. The main difference between the proposed method and existing bus encoding techniques is that it is strongly application-dependent, in the sense that it is Based on the analysis of the execution stream of a given program. This allows an accurate computation of the correlations that may exist between blocks of bits in consecutive patterns, and that can be successfully exploited to determine an encoding which minimizes the bus transition activity. Experimental results, obtained on a set of special-purpose applications, are very promising; reductions of the bus activity up to 64.8% (41.9% on average) have been achieved over the original address streams.