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ASP-DAC/VLSI Design 2002
Software-Only Bus Encoding Techniques for an Embedded System
Bangalore, India
January 07-January 11
ISBN: 0-7695-1441-3
Wei-Chung Cheng, University of Southern California
Jian-Lin Liang, University of Southern California
Massoud Pedram, University of Southern California
Microprocessors with built-in Liquid Crystal Device (LCD) controllers and equipped with Flash memory are common in mobile computing applications. In the first part of the paper, a software-only encoding technique is proposed to reduce the power consumption of the processor-memory bus when displaying an image on the LCD. Based on the translation mechanism of the LCD controller, our approach is to start with the palette as a coding table for the pixel buffer and then reassign the codes according to the image characteristics. Experimental results prove the efficacy of this approach; power reduction reaches 29% for text-based and 17% for graphics-based images. In the second part of the paper, another software-only encoding technique is presented to reduce the transitions on the processor-CompactFlash bus. The device driver in Linux operating system is modified to perform Bus-Invert encoding when the data is read from or written to a Compact Flash file system. With minimal software overhead, the transitions on the bus are reduced by up to 25%.
Index Terms:
memory bus encoding, low power, bus activity minimization, LCD, CompactFlash, Flash memory
Citation:
Wei-Chung Cheng, Jian-Lin Liang, Massoud Pedram, "Software-Only Bus Encoding Techniques for an Embedded System," vlsid, pp.126, ASP-DAC/VLSI Design 2002, 2002
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