A dictionary-based en/decoding scheme for low-power data buses

As bus lengths on multihundred-million transistor systems-on-a-chip (SoC) grow, and as interwire capacitances of sub-0.10 (mu)m technologies advance, the resulting high-switching capacitances of buses (and interconnects in general) have a nonnegligible impact on the power consumption of a whole SoC. This trend has been recognized and recently addressed by various research groups. We address this problem by introducing our bus encoding technique, adaptive dictionary-encoding scheme "ADES" that minimizes the power consumption of data buses through a dictionary-based encoding technique. Based on exploration of data properties on buses, our technique saves on average more than 25% of bus energy compared to the nonencoded cases using a large set of real-world applications for both address and data buses. Furthermore, we compare our technique to the best-known data bus encoding techniques to date and we find that it exceeds all of them in terms of energy savings for the same set of applications.