Low power techniques for address encoding and memory allocation

Abstract

This paper presents encoding techniques to optimize the switching activity on a multiplexed DRAM address bus. The DRAM switching activity can be classified either as external (between two consecutive addresses) or internal (between the row and column addresses of the same address). To eliminate the external switching activity for sequential access, we propose an optimal encoding, Pyramid code, for conventional DRAM mode as well as Burst Pyramid code for burst mode DRAM. To minimize the internal switching activity, we propose Scattered Paging for both random and sequential access patterns by exploiting the built-in virtual memory mechanism, which is commonly present on modern processors.