Instruction Transfer And Storage Exploration for Low Energy VLIWs

For multimedia applications, loop buffering is an efficient mechanism to reduce the power in the instruction memory of embedded processors. In particular, software controlled clustered loop buffers are potentially very energy efficient. However current compilers for VLIW do not fully exploit the potentials offered by such a clustered organization. This paper presents ITSE, Instruction Transfer and Storage Exploration, a methodology to minimize the instruction memory energy using a software controlled clustered loop buffer as a basis. Results for the MediaBench application suite show 61% reduction (on average) in energy in the instruction memory hierarchy as compared to traditional, existing non-clustered approaches to the loop buffer without compromising performance.