Energy-aware compilation and hardware design for VLIW embedded systems
José L. Ayala, Marisa López‐Vallejo, David Atienza, Praveen Raghavan, Francky Catthoor, Diederik Verkest · International Journal of Embedded Systems · 2007
Tomorrow's embedded devices need to run multimedia applications demanding high computational power with low energy consumption constraints. In this context, the register file is a key source of power consumption and its inappropriate design and management severely affects system power. In this paper, we present a new approach to reduce the energy of shared register files in forthcoming embedded VLIW processors running real-life applications up to 60% without performance penalty. This approach relies on limited hardware extensions and a compiler-based energy-aware register assignment algorithm to deactivate at run-time parts of the register file (i.e., sub-banks) in an independent way.