Register File Delay-Writeback in Embedded Microprocessors

To reduce the power consumption of register file in embedded microprocessors,a register file delay-writeback technique based on fetch-throttling is proposed.Due to the fact that the front-end is faster than the back-end in microprocessors,traditional register file delay-writeback techniques are not effective.Our method improves the efficiency greatly through fetch-throttling.Not only the redundant writes to register file are reduced,but also the power of processor front-end is reduced.The experimental results on FPGA show that the proposed technique reduced 35% writes to register file and 15% accesses to ICache for EEMBC programs with little performance loss and no additional overhead.