An Ultra Low-Power TLB Design

This paper presents an ultra low-power TLB design, which combines two techniques to minimize the power dissipated in TLB accesses. In our design, we first propose a real-time filter scheme to eliminate the redundant TLB accesses. Without delay penalty the proposed real-time filter can distinguish the redundant TLB access as soon as the virtual address is generated. The second technique is a banking-like structure, which aims to reduce the TLB power consumption in case of necessary accesses. We present two adaptive variants of the banked TLB. Compared to the conventional banked TLB, these two variants achieve better power efficiency without increasing the TLB miss ratio. The experimental results show that by filtering out all the redundant TLB accesses and then minimizing the power consumption per TLB access, our design can effectively improve the energy delay product of the TLBs, especially for the data TLBs with poor spatial locality