The Potential of Temperature-Aware Configurable Cache on Energy Reduction

Abstract Active power used to be the primary contributor to total power dissipation of CMOS designs, but with the technology scaling, the share of leakage in total power consumption of digital systems continues to grow. Moreover, temperature is another factor that exponentially increases the leakage current. In this paper, we show the effects of temperature and technology nodes on the optimal (minimum-energy-consuming) cache configuration for low energy embedded systems. We show that a temperature-aware configurable cache is an effective way to save energy in finer technologies when the embedded system may be used in different temperatures. Our results show that using a temperature-aware configurable cache, up to 66 % energy can be saved with only 1 % performance penalty for instruction cache and 74 % energy saving with 4.7 % performance loss for data cache