• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.5 s.311
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• pp.1-7
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• 2006

This paper presents experimental instruction-level current consumption model for low power microcontroller ATmega128. The accessibility of instruction for internal memory decides power consumption of the microcontroller as much as 17% of difference between access instruction and non-access instruction. The power consumption for the given program will be increased in the proportional to the ratio of memory access instruction and lower level memory access in the hierarchy. Throughout the current consumption model, the power consumption can be predicted and optimized in the direction of reducing the frequency memory access. Also, the various optimization methods are introduced in terms of software and hardware viewpoints.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.97-105
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• 2016

Microcontrollers (MCUs) for endpoint smart sensor devices of internet-of-thing (IoT) are being implemented as system-on-chip (SoC) with on-chip instruction flash memory, in which user firmware is embedded. MCUs directly fetch binary code-based instructions through bit-line sense amplifier (S/A) integrated with on-chip flash memory. The S/A compares bit cell current with reference current to identify which data are programmed. The S/A in reading '0' (erased) cell data consumes a large sink current, which is greater than off-current for '1' (programmed) cell data. The main motivation of our approach is to reduce the number of accesses of erased cells by binary code level transformation. This paper proposes a built-in write/read path architecture using binary code inversion method based on hot-spot region detection of instruction code access to reduce sensing current in S/A. From the profiling result of instruction access patterns, hot-spot region of an original compiled binary code is conditionally inverted with the proposed bit-inversion techniques. The de-inversion hardware only consumes small logic current instead of analog sink current in S/A and it is integrated with the conventional S/A to restore original binary instructions. The proposed techniques are applied to the fully-custom designed MCU with ARM Cortex-M0$^{TM}$ using 0.18um Magnachip Flash-embedded CMOS process and the benefits in terms of power consumption reduction are evaluated for Dhrystone$^{TM}$ benchmark. The profiling environment of instruction code executions is implemented by extending commercial ARM KEIL$^{TM}$ MDK (MCU Development Kit) with our custom-designed access analyzer.

• Information and Communications Magazine
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• v.25 no.12
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• pp.10-18
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• 2008

In this paper, we present a low-power design of H.264 codec based on dedicated hardware and software solution on EMP(ETRI Multi-core platform). The dedicated hardware scheme has reducing computation using motion estimation skip and reducing memory access for motion estimation. The design reduces data transfer load to 66% compared to conventional method. The gate count of H.264 encoder and the performance is about 455k and 43Mhz@30fps with D1(720x480) for H.264 encoder. The software solution is with ASIP(Application Specific Instruction Processor) that it is SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data), Dual Issue VLIW(Very Long Instruction Word) core, specified register file for SIMD, internal memory and data memory access for memory controller, 6 step pipeline, and 32 bits bus width. Performance and gate count is 400MHz@30fps with CIF(Common Intermediated format) and about 100k per core for H.264 decoder.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• summer
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• pp.204-208
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• 2004

Embedded business will be expanded market more and more since customers seek more wearable and ubiquitous systems. Cellular telephones, PDAs, notebooks and portable multimedia devices could bring higher microprocessor revenues and more rewarding improvements in performance and functions. Increasing battery capacity is still creeping along the roadmap. Until a small practical fuel cell becomes available, microprocessor developers must come up with power-reduction methods. According to MPR 2003, the instruction and data caches of ARM920T processor consume $44\%$ of total processor power. The rest of it is split into the power consumptions of the integer core, memory management units, bus interface unit and other essential CPU circuitry. And the relationships among CPU, peripherals and caches may change in the future. The processor working on higher operating frequency will exact larger cache RAM and consume more energy. In this paper, we propose advanced low power trace cache which caches traces of the dynamic instruction stream, and reduces cache access times. And we evaluate the performance of the trace cache and estimate the power of the trace cache, which is compared with conventional cache.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.44 no.5
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• pp.12-19
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• 2007

This paper presents an ASIP(Application Specific Instruction Set Processor) for implementation of H.264/AVC, called VSIP(Video Specific Instruction-set Processor). The proposed VSIP has novel instructions and optimized hardware architectures for specific applications, such as intra prediction, in-loop deblocking filter, integer transform, etc. Moreover, VSIP has hardware accelerators for computation intensive parts in video signal processing, such as inter prediction and entropy coding. The VSIP has much smaller area and can dramatically reduce the number of memory access compared with commercial DSP chips, which result in low power consumption. The proposed VSIP can efficiently perform in real-time video processing and it can support various profiles and standards.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.33-39
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• 2008

Energy efficiency should be considered together with performance when designing embedded processors. This paper proposes a new energy-aware instruction cache design using backward branch information to reduce the energy consumption in an embedded processor, since instruction caches consume a significant fraction of the on-chip energy. Proposed instruction cache is composed of two caches: a large main instruction cache and a small loop instruction cache. Proposed technique enables the selective access between the main instruction cache and the loop instruction cache to reduce the number of accesses to the main instruction cache, leading to good energy efficiency. Analysis results show that the proposed instruction cache reduces the energy consumption by 20% on the average, compared to the traditional instruction cache.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2011

NAND type Flash memory has performing much researches for a hard disk substitution due to its low power consumption, cheap prices and a large storage. Especially, the NAND type flash memory is using general buffer systems of a cache memory for improving overall system performance, but this has shown a tendency to emphasize in terms of data. So, our research is to design a high performance instruction NAND type flash memory structure by using a buffer system. The proposed buffer system in a NAND flash memory consists of two parts, i.e., a fully associative temporal buffer for branch instruction and a fully associative spatial buffer for spatial locality. The spatial buffer with a large fetching size turns out to be effective serial instructions, and the temporal buffer with a small fetching size can achieve effective branch instructions. According to the simulation results, we can reduce average miss ratios by around 77% and the average memory access time can achieve a similar performance compared with the 2-way, victim and fully associative buffer with two or four sizes.