A Single Cycle Accessible Two-Level Cache Architecture for Reducing the Energy Consumption of Embedded Systems

International SoC Design Conference (ISOCC 2008) : November 24-25, 2008 : Busan, KoreaEmploying a small L0-cache between anMPU core and an L1-cache is one of the most promising approaches for reducing the energy consumption of memory subsystems. Since the L0-cache is small, if there is a hit, the energy consumption will be reduced. On the other hand, if there is a miss, one extra cycle is required to access the L1-cache. This leads to a degradation of the processor performance. For resolving this problem, a Single cycle accessible Two-level Cache (STC) architecture is proposed in this paper. This architecture makes it possible to access to both the L0 and the L1 caches from an MPU core in a cycle. Experiments using several benchmark programs demonstrate that the STC architecture reduces the energy consumption of memory subsystems by 13% without any performance degradation compared to the best results obtained by previous approaches