Size-constrained code placement for cache miss rate reduction

In design of an embedded system with a cache, it is important to minimize the cache miss rate to reduce the power consumption as well as to improve the performance of the system. We have previously proposed a code placement method which minimizes miss rates of instruction caches (1996), but it makes code size larger. In most cases, code size is a tight design constraint. In this paper, we propose a size-constrained code placement method which minimizes cache miss rates under constraint on code size given by system designers. Experimental results show that the size-constrained code placement method achieves 36% decrease in cache misses with only 1.6% increase in code size compared with a naive placement, while the previous method proposed decreases 36% of cache misses with 25% increase in code size.