Low power address encoding using self-organizing lists

Off-chip bus transitions are a major source of power dissipation for embedded systems. In this paper, new adaptive encoding schemes are proposed that significantly reduce transition activity on data and multiplexed address buses, that do not add redundancy in space or time and which have minimal delay overhead. These adaptive techniques are based on self-organising lists to achieve reduction in transition activity by exploiting the spatial and temporal locality of the addresses. Unlike previous approaches that focus on instruction address buses, experiments demonstrate significant reduction in transition activity of up to 54% in data address buses and up to 59% in multiplexed address buses. The average reductions are twice those obtained using current schemes on a data address bus and more than twice those obtained on a multiplexed address bus.