Reducing Address Bus Transitions for Low Power Memory Mapping
Preeti Ranjan Panda, Nikil D. Dutt · 1996
We present low power techniques for mapping arrays in behavioral specifications to physical memory, specifically for memory intensive behaviors that exhibit regularity in their memory access patterns. Our approach exploits this regularity in memory accesses by reducing the number of transitions on the memory address bus. We study the impact of different strategies for mapping arrays in behaviors to physical memory, on power dissipation during memory accesses. We describe a heuristic for selecting a memory mapping strategy to achieve low power, and present an evaluation of the architecture that implements the mapping techniques to study the transition count overhead. Experiments on several image processing benchmarks indicate power savings of upto 63 % through reduced transition activity on the memory address bus. 1 Introduction Recent research efforts in low power design techniques are driven by portable communication and multimedia applications. Memory forms an important constituent...