A spatially-adaptive bus interface for low-switching communication

Adaptive encoding has been shown to be an effective approach to bus power minimization in situations where characterization of the input statistics is not available. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for adaptive bus encoding that, conversely from existing solutions, exploits spatial correlations in the input data being transmitted to increase the accuracy in the dynamic selection of the encoding function. We discuss the encoding algorithm and we describe an architecture for its implementation as bus interface. We present experimental data collected in a realistic simulation framework on a number of meaningful benchmarks, and we compare them to those obtained through the application of existing encoding schemes.