Purdue News
Purdue News
|
|
June 2001 Low-power circuits increasingly needed in wireless ageWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University engineers have designed an innovative circuit shown to drastically reduce the amount of power needed to run a computer's memory. The technology is aimed at saving energy, enabling portable devices to run longer on a single charge and to use lighter-weight batteries. "The ultimate goal is to keep the performance at the highest level possible while reducing power consumption to as low as possible," says T.N. Vijaykumar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. Power conservation is critical for laptop computers, medical devices that are worn on or implanted in the body, and a plethora of emerging wireless devices that run on batteries. The low-power issue also is becoming increasingly important for ultra-powerful "parallel processors" used for everything from weather forecasting to animation. These computers require so much power that they place an enormous load on a building's electrical system. Meanwhile, just as high-performance wireless and portable devices are proliferating, battery technology is reaching its limits, making low-power designs more attractive. Vijaykumar is involved with other faculty in a project at Purdue called ICALP, for Integrated Circuit/Architecture Approach to Low Power, which was formed to develop innovative low-power computer microprocessors. Recent ICALP work has resulted in a circuit design shown to dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed to run a computer's memory. The new circuit is designed to continually monitor how much memory is needed ‹ depending on the programs that are running at any given time ‹ and then strategically shut down unneeded memory circuits automatically. The design also reduces the amount of electricity that is normally "leaked" from memory circuits in a computer's microprocessor chip. Computer simulations have shown that the design would reduce the amount of energy consumed by a computer's cache memory by 62 percent, while degrading overall performance by only 4 percent. Cache temporarily stores only the information being accessed most often by a computer user, making for much faster retrieval of that information than would be possible if it were stored along with all the other memory. However, there is a tradeoff for the high performance provided by cache memory: It consumes a large amount of energy. Presently, computers run on full power all the time, even if they are using programs that require only a small portion of the system's total memory. "Sure, they have beautiful performance, but they give you that performance whether you want it or not," Vijaykumar says. ""But sometimes we will need only 10 percent of the memory that is on the chip. As the application is running, we are going to figure out how much memory it needs and cut down the power for the rest of the unused portion." The smart circuit reevaluates how much memory is needed every thousandth of a second by counting the number of times cache memory is unable to find information requested during that time. If the cache memory is too often unable to retrieve requested information, more memory is automatically made available. Conversely, if performance is higher than the level required, memory is reduced.Sources: T.N. Vijaykumar, (765) 494-0592, vijay@ecn.purdue.edu Kaushik Roy, (765) 494-2361, kaushik@ecn.purdue.edu Writer: Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, evenere@purdue.edu Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: An electronic and hard copy of the research paper referred to in this release is available from Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, evenere@purdue.edu. ABSTRACT Gated-Vdd: A Circuit Technique to Reduce Leakage Michael Powell, Se-Hyun Yang, Babak Falsafi, Kaushik Roy, and T.N. Vijaykumar Deep-submicron CMOS designs have resulted in large leakage energy dissipation in microprocessors. While SRAM cells in on-chip cache memories always contribute to this leakage, there is a large variability in active cell usage both within and across applications. This paper explores an integrated architectural and circuit-level approach to reducing leakage energy dissipation in instruction caches. We propose, gated-Vdd, a circuit-level technique to gate the supply voltage and reduce leakage in unused SRAM cells. Our results indicate that gated-Vdd together with a novel resizeable cache architecture reduces energy-delay by 62 percent with minimal impact on performance.
|
