Reducing Power and Energy Consumption of Nonvolatile Microcontrollers with Transparent On-Chip Instruction Cache

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.

A High Performance and Energy Efficient Microprocessor with a Novel Restricted Dynamically Reconfigurable Accelerator

In the era of Internet of Things, the battery life of edge devices must be extended for sensing connection to the Internet. We aim to reduce the power consumption of the microprocessor embedded in such devices by using a novel dynamically reconfigurable accelerator. Conventional microprocessors consume a large amount of power for memory access, in registers, and for the control of the processor itself rather than computation;this decreases the energy efficiency. Dynamically reconfigurable accelerators reduce such redundant power by computing in parallel on reconfigurable switches and processing element arrays (often consisting of an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and registers). We propose a novel dynamically reconfigurable accelerator “DYNaSTA” composed of a dynamically reconfigurable data path and static ALU arrays. The static ALU arrays process instructions in parallel without registers and improve energy efficiency. The dynamically reconfigurable data path includes registers and many switches dynamically reconfigured to resolve operand dependencies between instructions mapped on the static ALU array, and forwards appropriate operands to the static ALU array. Therefore, the DYNaSTA accelerator has more flexibility while improving the energy efficiency compared with the conventional dynamically reconfigurable accelerators. We simulated the power consumption of the proposed DYNaSTA accelerator and measured the fabricated chip. As a result, the power consumption was reduced by 69% to 86%, and the energy efficiency improved 4.5 to 13 times compared to a general RISC microprocessor.