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This paper presents a novel low-energy memory design technique, considering effective bitwidth of variables for applicationspecific systems, called VAbM technique. It targets the exploitation of both data locality and effective bitwidth of variables to reduce energy consumed by redundant bits. Under constraints of the number of memory banks, the VAbM technique use variable analysis results to perform allocating and assigning on-chip RAM into multiple memory banks, which have different size with different number of word lines and different number of bit lines tailored to each application requirements. Experimental results with several real embedded applications demonstrate significant energy reduction up to 64.8% over monolithic memory, and 18.4% over memory designed by banking technique.

To transfer a small number, we inherently need the small number of bits. But all bit lines on a data bus change their status and redundant power is consumed. To reduce the redundant power consumption, we introduce a concept named active bits. In this paper, we propose a power reduction scheme for data buses using the active bits. Suppressing switching activity of inactive bits, we can reduce redundant power consumption. We propose various power reduction techniques using active bits and the implementation methods. Experimental results illustrate 20%-35% on average and up to 54.2% switching activity reduction.

This paper presents a new concept called active data bitwidth, which is the effective data length of data bus. By means of profiling the active data bitwidth dynamically, we present a novel low-energy memory access technique for on-chip data memory design. By reducing the redundant access energy of data memory, our experimental results of two real applications, show that we can achieve significant energy reduction. Compared to the monolithic memory, for JPEG, 52.2%; for MPEG-2 84.2%, the energy reduction is reported. Compared to the memory banking technique, 12.3% energy reduction for JPEG and 65.9% for MPEG-2 is reported.

This paper presents a novel low-energy memory design technique, considering effective bitwidth of variables for applicationspecific systems, called VAbM technique. It targets the exploitation of both data locality and effective bitwidth of variables to reduce energy consumed by redundant bits. Under constraints of the number of memory banks, the VAbM technique use variable analysis results to perform allocating and assigning on-chip RAM into multiple memory banks, which have different size with different number of word lines and different number of bit lines tailored to each application requirements. Experimental results with several real embedded applications demonstrate significant energy reduction up to 64.8% over monolithic memory, and 18.4% over memory designed by banking technique.