Abstract
Demands for low-energy microcontrollers have been increasing in recent years. Since most microcontrollers achieve user programmability by integrating nonvolatile (NV) memories such as flash memories for storing their programs, the large power consumption required in accessing an NV memory has become a major problem. This problem becomes critical when the power supply voltage of NV microcontrollers is decreased. We can solve this problem by introducing an instruction cache, thus reducing the access frequency of the NV memory. Unlike general-purpose microprocessors, microcontrollers used for real-time applications in embedded systems must accurately calculate program execution time prior to its execution. Therefore, we introduce a “transparent” instruction cache, which does not change the existing NV microcontroller’s cycle-level execution time, for reducing power and energy consumption, but not for improving the processing speed. We have conducted detailed microar chitecture design based on the architecture of a major industrial microcontroller, and we evaluated power and energy consumption for several benchmark programs. Our evaluation shows that the proposed instruction cache can successfully reduce energy consumption in a fairly wide range of practical NV microcontroller configurations.
Highlights
In recent years, sensor networks have been widely studied as a fundamental technology to help realize the concept of the “SmartSociety” [1]
2) Evaluation based on a realistic microcontroller architecture: We evaluated the power and energy consumption of our system, which was built on a base microcontroller, Renesas Electronics Corporation’s 78K0R
We evaluated the power and energy consumption of each instruction cache system by examining the results of a back-annotated simulation, using the chip design data generated in the second step
Summary
Sensor networks have been widely studied as a fundamental technology to help realize the concept of the “SmartSociety” [1]. (2014) Reducing Power and Energy Consumption of Nonvolatile Microcontrollers with Transparent On-Chip Instruction Cache. It is necessary to reduce power consumption of microcontrollers that operate sensor nodes. NV microcontrollers (microcontrollers integrated with on-chipnonvolatile memories) are widely used due to their convenience in helping develop embedded system software. It is difficult to reduce the power consumption of nonvolatile memories in microcontrollers. The purpose of our work is to reduce power and energy consumption by introducing an instruction cache to the microcontroller, which will reduce the frequency of access of the nonvolatile memory
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