Low-Power Design of an Embedded Microprocessor Core

Low-power consumption has emerged as a very important issue in the design of integrated circuits in CMOS technology. The basic idea behind low-power RISC-like architectures is to reduce the number of executed instructions and clock cycles for the execution of a given task. In addition to these architectural issues, important power savings have been obtained by lowering the supply voltage, by pipelining, by adopting gated clock techniques as well as by using hierarchical memories.