Minimizing Leakage Energy with Modulo Scheduling for VLIW DSP Processors

As technology scaling approaches to the nanometer, leakage power has become a significant component of the total power consumption. In this paper, we develop a novel leakage-aware modulo scheduling algorithm to achieve leakage energy savings for DSP applications with loops on VLIW architecture. The proposed algorithm is designed to maximize the idleness of function units integrating with leakage management scheme [9], and reduce the number of transitions between active and sleep modes. We have implemented our technique into the Trimaran compiler [1] and conducted experiments using a set of benchmarks from DSPstone [11] and Mibench [7] on the VLIW simulator of Trimaran. The results show that our algorithm achieves significant leakage energy savings compared with the leakageaware scheduling algorithm [8].