A dictionary-based en/decoding scheme for low-power data buses
As bus lengths on multihundred-million transistor systems-on-a-chip (SOC) grow, and as interwire capacitances of sub-0.10 mum technologies advance, the resulting high-switching capacitances of buses (and interconnects in general) have a nonnegligible impact on the power consumption of a whole SOC. This trend has been recognized and recently addressed by various research groups. We address this problem by introducing our bus encoding technique, adaptive dictionary-encoding scheme "ADES" that minimizes the power consumption of data buses through a dictionary-based encoding technique. Based on exploration of data properties on buses, our technique saves on average more than 25% of bus energy compared to the nonencoded cases using a large set of real-world applications for both address and data buses. Furthermore, we compare our technique to the best-known data bus encoding techniques to date and we find that it exceeds all of them in terms of energy savings for the same set of applications.
data buses encoding low power microprocessor