Deadline-Constrained Clustered Scheduling for VLIW Architectures using Power-Gated Register Files
Zhibin Liang, Wei Zhang, Yung-Cheng Ma · ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization · 2014
Designing energy-efficient Digital Signal Processor (DSP) cores has become a key concern in embedded systems development. This paper proposes an energy-proportional computing scheme for Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures. To make the processor power scales with adapted parallelism, we propose incorporating distributed Power-Gated Register Files (PGRF) into VLIW to achieve a PGRF-VLIW architecture. For energy efficiency, we also propose an instruction scheduling algorithm called the Deadline-Constrained Clustered Scheduling (DCCS) algorithm. The algorithm clusters the data dependence graph to reduce data transfer energy and makes optimal use of low-powered local registers for tree-structured data dependence graphs. The results of evaluations conducted using the MiBench and DSPstone benchmark suites substantiate the expected power saving and scaling effects.