Design and evaluation of fine-grained power-gating for embedded microprocessors

Power-performance efficiency is still remaining a primary concern for microprocessor designers. One of the sources of power inefficiency for recent LSI chips is increasing leakage power consumption. Power-gating is a well known technique to reduce leakage power consumption by switching off the power supply to idle logic blocks. Recently, fine-grained power-gating is emerged as a technique to minimize leakage current during the active processor cycles by switching on and off a logic blocks in much finer temporal/spatial granularity. Though fine-grained power-gating is useful, a comprehensive evaluation and analysis has not been conducted on a real LSI chips. In this paper, we evaluate fine-grained run-time power-gating for microprocessors' functional units using a real embedded microprocessor. We also introduce an architecture and compiler co-operative power-gating scheme which mitigates negative power reduction caused by the energy overhead associated with finegrained power-gating. The experimental results with a fabricated core shows that a hardware-based scheme saves power consumption of functional units by 44% and hardware compiler co-operative scheme further improves power efficiency by 5.9% when core temperature is 25 °C.

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