Some Ideas on Improving Compilation Techniques for Reducing Power Consumption

For a portable digital device, power consumption is crucial under the constraint of limited battery life. Switching activity in CMOS circuits contributes to a significant amount of power consumption. Efforts are made in every design level to help hardware reduce the switching activity required to execute the program. In this paper, we study the problem of reducing power consumption arising from sign extension from the instruction level. Some ideas are proposed to reduce power consumption by eliminating unnecessary sign extension operations when a program is in the datapath. Experiments show that there exist many opportunities for improvement.