Reducing energy consumption by dynamic copying of instructions onto onchip memory

Abstract

The number of mobile embedded systems is increasing and all of them are limited in their uptime by their battery capacity. Several hardware changes have been introduced during the last years, but the steadily growing functionality still requires further energy reductions, e.g. through software optimizations. A significant amount of energy can be saved in the memory hierarchy where most of the energy is consumed. In this paper, a new software technique is presented which supports the use of an onchip scratchpad memory by dynamically copying program parts into it. The set of selected program parts are determined with an optimal algorithm using integer linear programming. Experimental results show a reduction of the energy consumption by nearly 30%, a performance increase by 25% against a common cache system and energy improvements against a static approach of up to 38%.