Low-Power Instruction Cache Architecture Using Pre-Tag Checking

In this paper, we propose a low-power instruction cache architecture utilizing three techniques - two-phased cache, sequential access indicator for tag-memory access skipping, and a new proposed technique named pre-tag checking. By these techniques, significant portion of tag-memory and data-memory accesses can be eliminated to reduce the power consumption. The experimental results show that the proposed instruction cache architecture can reduce about 54% power consumption compared to the conventional one for an 8 KB two-way set associative cache.