On-Chip Power Minimization Using Serialization-Widening with Frequent Value Encoding

Abstract

In chip-multiprocessors (CMP) architecture, the L2 cache is shared by the L1 cache of each processor core, resulting in a high volume of diverse data transfer through the L1-L2 cache bus. High-performance CMP and SoC systems have a significant amount of data transfer between the on-chip L2 cache and the L3 cache of off-chip memory through the power expensive off-chip memory bus. This paper addresses the problem of the high-power consumption of the on-chip data buses, exploring a framework for memory data bus power consumption minimization approach. A comprehensive analysis of the existing bus power minimization approaches is provided based on the performance, power, and area overhead consideration. A novel approaches for reducing the power consumption for the on-chip bus is introduced. In particular, a serialization-widening (SW) of data bus with frequent value encoding (FVE), called the SWE approach, is proposed as the best power savings approach for the on-chip cache data bus. The experimental results show that the SWE approach with FVE can achieve approximately 54% power savings over the conventional bus for multicore applications using a 64-bit wide data bus in 45 nm technology.