Anticipatory access pipeline design for phased cache

Abstract

For an embedded processor, the cache design almost occupies half chip area and power consumption. According to Amdahl's law, if the power consumption of cache memories is reduced, the embedded processor can significantly save much power. However, the cache misses result in the penalty of thousands of cycles waiting and power consumption due to increasing the number of external memory access. Based on the above reason, the phased cache design is proposed and can largely improve the power consumption which wastes a set-associative cache. In this paper, the embedded pipelining processor without stalling and low-power phase cache is practiced with high-level simulation to achieve high-performance and low-power design. As experimental results, the proposed phase cache can reduce 44% power consumption compared with traditional one-access-cycle cache and eliminate pipeline stalls incurred by phased cache with only 6% gate count overhead.