Battery aware instruction generation for embedded processors

Automatic instruction generation is an efficient method to satisfy growing performance and meet design constraints for application specific instruction-set processors. A typical approach for instruction generation is to combine a large group of primitive instructions into a single extensible instruction for maximizing speedups. However, this approach often leads to large power dissipation and discharge current, posing a challenge to battery-powered products. In this paper, we propose a battery-aware automatic tool to design extensible instructions which minimizes power dissipation distribution by separating an instruction into multiple instructions. We verify our automatic tool using 50 different code segments, and five large real-world applications. Our tool reduces energy consumption by a further 5.8% on average (up to 17.7%) compared to extensible instructions generated by previous approaches. For real-world applications, energy consumption is reduced by 6.6% on average (up to 16.53%) as well as an increase in performance for most cases. The automatic instruction generation tool is integrated into our application specific instruction-set processor tool suite.