Abstract
Power consumption has become a critical factor for embedded systems, especially for battery powered ones. Caches in these systems consume a large portion of the whole chip power. Embedded systems usually adopt set-associative caches to get better performance. However, parallel accessed cache ways incur more energy dissipation. This paper proposed a region-based way-partitioning scheme to reduce cache way access, and without sacrificing performance, to reduce the cache power consumption. The stack accesses and non-stack accesses are isolated and redirected to different ways of the L1 data cache. Under way-partitioning, cache way accesses are reduced, as well as the memory reference interference. Experimental results show that the proposed approach could save around 27.5% of L1 data cache energy on average, without significant performance degradation.