Instruction Format Design for Low Power Embedded Systems

Abstract:

Embedded systems demand to take high performance while executing on batteries. In such environment, the systems must be optimized with available technique to reduce energy consumption while not sacrificing performance. Especially, in mobile devices, power consumption is an important design constraint. Switching activity accounts for over 90% of total power consumption in a digital circuit. In this paper, we describe an approach to design instruction format for low power instruction fetch. The proposed method reduces switching activity of the instruction fetch logic by using a heuristic that minimizes switching between adjacent instructions. To do this, the proposed approach encodes opcodes so that frequently executed instruction pairs have smaller bit changes.

• Periodical: Applied Mechanics and Materials (Volumes 789-790)
• Pages: 829-832
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.789-790.829
• Online since: September 2015
• Authors: Jong Hee M. Youn, Dae Jin Park, Jeong Hun Cho, Doo San Cho
• Keywords: Embedded System, Instruction Set Architecture, Low Power, Optimization

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