Reducing access energy of on-chip data memory considering active data bitwidth

Abstract

This paper presents a new concept called active data bitwidth, which is the effective data length of data bus. By means of profiling the active data bitwidth dynamically, we present a novel low-energy memory access technique for on-chip data memory design. By reducing the redundant access energy of data memory, our experimental results of two real applications, show that we can achieve significant energy reduction. Compared to the monolithic memory, for JPEG, 52.2%; for MPEG-2 84.2%, the energy reduction is reported. Compared to the memory banking technique, 12.3% energy reduction for JPEG and 65.9% for MPEG-2 is reported.