• Journal of The Institute of Information and Telecommunication Facilities Engineering
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.74-79
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• 2011

The goal of this research is to reduce dynamic and static power consumption for a low power cache system. The proposed cache can achieve a low power consumption by using a drowsy and a way prediction mechanism. For reducing the static power, the drowsy technique is used at 4-way set associative cache. And for reducing the dynamic energy, one among four ways is selectively accessed on the basis of information in the Way-Line Prediction Unit (WLPU). This prediction mechanism does not introduce any additional delay though prediction misses are occurred. The WLPU can effectively reduce the performance overhead of the conventional drowsy caching by waking only a drowsy cache line and one way in advance. Our results show that the proposed cache can reduce the power consumption by about 40% compared with the 4-way drowsy cache.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.166-177
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• 2006

The cache size tends to grow in the embedded processor as technology scales to smaller transistors and lower supply voltages. However, larger cache size demands more energy. Accordingly, the ratio of the cache energy consumption to the total processor energy is growing. Many cache energy schemes have been proposed for reducing the cache energy consumption. However, these previous schemes are concerned with one side for reducing the cache energy consumption, dynamic cache energy only, or static cache energy only. In this paper, we propose a hybrid scheme for reducing dynamic and static cache energy, simultaneously. for this hybrid scheme, we adopt two existing techniques to reduce static cache energy consumption, drowsy cache technique, and to reduce dynamic cache energy consumption, way-prediction technique. Additionally, we propose a early wake-up technique based on program counter to reduce penalty caused by applying drowsy cache technique. We focus on level 1 data cache. The hybrid scheme can reduce static and dynamic cache energy consumption simultaneously, furthermore our early wake-up scheme can reduce extra program execution cycles caused by applying the hybrid scheme.

• Journal of The Institute of Information and Telecommunication Facilities Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.115-120
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• 2011

Recently flash memory is widely used in various mobile devices as storage medium. Nonvolatile memory can be divided into two categories: NAND- and NOR-type flash memory. NOR flash memory is mainly used to store instruction codes for operation; while NAND for data storage. However, NAND does show more economical benefits, that is, it is approximately 30~40% cheaper than NOR flash. Therefore it can be useful to improve NAND flash performance by replacing NOR flash with NAND flash combining with various buffer systems.