A banked-promotion translation lookaside buffer system
We present a simple but high performance translation lookaside buffer (TLB) system with low power consumption for use in embedded systems. Our TLB structure supports two page sizes dynamically and selectively to achieve high performance with low hardware cost. To minimize power consumption, a banked-TLB is constructed by dividing one fully associative (FA) TLB space into two separate FA TLBs. These two structures are integrated to form a banked-promotion (BP) TLB. Promotion overcomes the unbalanced utilization of a banked-TLB by moving adjacent entries out of the primary banks into a separate super-page TLB. Simulation results show that the Energy*Delay product can be reduced by about 99.8%, 19.2%, 24.2%, and 24.4% compared with a FA TLB, a micro-TLB, a banked-TLB, and a victim-TLB respectively. Therefore, the BP TLB offers high performance with low power consumption and low hardware cost.
translation lookaside buffer low power memory hierarchy memory management performance evaluation