Low Power Trace Cache for Embedded Processor

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.