Title: Energy-aware compilation and hardware design for VLIW embedded systems

Authors: Jose L. Ayala, Marisa Lopez-Vallejo, David Atienza, Praveen Raghavan, Francky Catthoor, Diederik Verkest

Addresses: Departamento de Ingenieria Electronica, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain. ' Departamento de Ingenieria Electronica, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain. ' DACYA, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. ' IMEC vzw, Leuven, Belgium; ESAT, Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Belgium. ' IMEC vzw, Leuven, Belgium; ESAT, Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Belgium. ' IMEC vzw, Leuven, Belgium; ESAT, Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Belgium; Vrije Univ. Brussel, Belgium

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: shared register files; low-power optimisations; compiler; VLIW processors; embedded systems; hardware design; multimedia applications; power consumption; energy-aware register assignment; energy-aware computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2007.016035

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2007 Vol.3 No.1/2, pp.73 - 82

Published online: 02 Dec 2007 *

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