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25th Euromicro Conference (EUROMICRO '99)-Volume 1
A Segmented Gray Code for Low-Power Microcontroller Address Buses
Milan, Italy
September 08-September 10
ISBN: 0-7695-0321-7
Rolf Hakenes, University of Saarland
Yiannos Manoli, University of Saarland
This paper presents a new approach in using the switching activity enhancements of a gray code on high capacitive microcontroller address lines. A novel segmented gray code is introduced that overcomes the exploding complexity disadvantage of higher bit width gray code incrementers compared to binary counters by breaking down the global scope of the common gray code. A method is developed to evaluate all possible 4 bit gray codes by performing a synthesis of an incrementer for each of the 2687 valid codes. Resulting from this evaluation a gray code is presented for which the area and power consumption of its incrementer is smaller than for a binary counter. This code combined with the concept of the segmented gray code used for a microprocessor program counter leads to a decrease of the switching activity on the address bus by 25-30% as well as to a decrease in the area and power consumption of the program counter by about 10%. Further some considerations are given about branches, displacements and indexed addressing in a microprocessor architecture that intends to implement the presented segmented gray code program counter.
Citation:
Rolf Hakenes, Yiannos Manoli, "A Segmented Gray Code for Low-Power Microcontroller Address Buses," euromicro, vol. 1, pp.1240, 25th Euromicro Conference (EUROMICRO '99)-Volume 1, 1999
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