A proposal of alternating a hare processor with tortoise processor for lower energy dissipation

摘要

In recent years, while portable electronic devices become more and more sophisticated, it is also strongly desired for them to save energy consumption to achieve long battery lifetime. In this report, we propose to implement both a high-performance processor (hare processor) and an energy-efficient processor (tortoise processor,) and to use them selectively according to performance demand. From circuit simulation result on 32-bit hare and tortoise processors designed for Rohm O.35μm process, 67 energy consumption is saved in the best case by using the tortoise processor instead of the hare processor operating at 3.3V and 100MHz. Further reduction of energy consumption is expected, if supply voltage scaling is applied to the proposed method.