Low-Energy Asynchronous Memory Design

摘要

We introduce the concept of energy per operation as a measure of performance ofan asynchronous circuit. We show how to model energy consumption based on the high level language specification. This model is independent of voltage and timing considerations. We apply this model to memory design. We show first how to dimension a memory array, and how to break up this memory array into smaller arrays to minimize the energy per access. We then show how to use cache memory and prefetch mechanisms to further reduce energy per access.