Instruction fetch energy reduction using loop caches for embedded applications with small tight loops

A fair amount of work has been done in recent years on reducing power consumption in caches by using a small instruction buffer placed between the execution pipe and a larger main cache. These techniques, however, often degrade the overall system performance. In this paper, we propose using a small instruction buffer, also called a loop cache, to save power. A loop cache has no address tag store. It consists of a direct-mapped data array and a loop cache controller. The loop cache controller knows precisely whether the next instruction request will hit in the loop cache, well ahead of time. As a result, there is no performance degradation.