Engineering Commons^™

Investigating Read/Write Aggregation To Exploit Power Reduction Opportunities Using Dual Supply Voltages, Gu Yunfei

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Power consumption plays an important role in computer system design today. On-chip memory structures such as multi-level cache make up a significant proportion of total power consumption of CPU or Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (AISC) chip, especially for memory-intensive application, such as floating-point computation and machine learning algorithm. Therefore, there is a clear motivation to reduce power consumption of these memory structures that are mostly consisting of Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) blocks. In this defense, I will present the framework of a novel dual-supply-voltage scheme that uses separate voltage levels for memory read and write operations. By quantitatively analyzing the cache …