A State-Based Predictive Approach for Leakage Reduction of Functional Units

As MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor) dimensions enter the sub-micrometer region, reducing leakage power becomes a significant issue of VLSI industry. In this paper, we propose a novel prediction approach to predict idleness of functional units for leakage energy management. Using a state-based predictor, historical utilization information of functional units is exploited to adjust the state of the predictor so as to enhance the accuracy of prediction. We implement our approach based on SimpleScalar and conduct experiments with a suite of fourteen benchmarks from Trimaran. The experimental results show that our approach achieves the better results compared with the previous work.