Predictive precharging for bitline leakage energy reduction [microprocessor caches]

As technology scales down into deep-submicron, leakage energy is becoming a dominant source of energy consumption. Leakage energy is generally proportional to the area of a circuit, and caches constitute a large portion of the processor die area. Therefore, there has been much effort to reduce leakage energy in caches. Most techniques have been targeted at cell leakage energy optimization. Bitline leakage energy also is critical. Thus, we propose a predictive precharging scheme to reduce bitline leakage energy. Results show that energy savings are significant with little performance degradation. Also, our predictive precharging is more beneficial in more aggressively scaled technologies.