A Leakage Efficient Data TLB Design for Embedded Processors

This paper presents a leakage efficient data TLB (Translation Look-aside Buffer) design for embedded processors. Due to the data locality in programs, data TLB references tend to hit only a small number of pages during short execution intervals. After dividing the overall execution time into smaller time slices, a leakage reduction mechanism is proposed to detect TLB entries which actually serve for virtual-to-physical address translations within each time slice. Thus, with the integration of the dual voltage supply technique, those TLB entries which are not used for address translations can be put into low leakage mode (with lower voltage supply) to save power. Evaluation results with eight MiBench programs show that the proposed design can reduce the leakage power of a data TLB by 37% on average, with performance degradation less than 0.01%. key words: leakage power, TLB, embedded processor