• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.11A no.7 s.91
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• pp.489-498
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• 2004

VLIW processor is considered to be an appropriate processor for the embedded system, provided with high performance and low power con-sumption due to its simple hardware structure. Unfortunately, the VLIW processor often suffers from high memory access latency due to the variable length of I-packets, which consist of independent instructions to be issued in parallel. It is because of the variable I-packet length that some I-packets must be placed over two cache blocks, which are called straddle I-packets, so that two cache accesses are required to fetch such I-packets. In this paper, an expansion buffer cache is proposed to improve not only the instruction fetch bandwidth, but also the power consumption of the I-cache with moderate hardware cost. The expansion buffer cache has a small expansion buffer containing a fraction of a straddle packet along with the main cache to reduce the additional cache accesses due to the straddle I-packets. With a great reduction in the cache accesses due to the straddle packets, the expansion buffer cache can achieve $5{\~}9{\%}$improvement over the conventional I-caches in the $Delay{\cdot}Power{\cdot}Area$ metric.