Intel Corporation

Kenneth Malich

Kumar Ganapathy

Ruban Kanapathippillai

Earle F Philhower, Iii

Manoj Mehta

Siva Venkatraman

Thu Nguyen

Ruban Kanapathipillai

Ruban Kanapathipiillai

Method and apparatus for reducing power consumption in a digital specific signal processor integrated circuit. Data buses are routed through multiplexers to reduce the number of busses routed across an integrated circuit and maintain their prior state. Global memory is clustered into memory clusters. The memory cluster having a memory block to be accessed is activated without activating other memory clusters in the global memory. Inactive data buses retain their state by use of bus state keepers. A loop buffer stores instructions within program loops to avoid memory accesses. Functional blocks can have their clocks gated instruction by instruction to lower power consumption. RISC and DSP units swap circuit activity to reduce power consumption. Local data memory is includes self-timed memory access activation and provides for off boundary access to further lower power consumption.

IC memory complex with controller for clusters of memory blocks I/O multiplexed using collar logic

An integrated circuit comprising a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) controller to execute RISC instructions, one or more digital signal processing (DSP) units to execute DSP instructions, and a unified instruction pipeline coupled to the RISC controller and the one or more DSP units, the unified instruction pipeline to decode and initiate execution of the RISC instructions and the DSP instructions of a unified RISC and DSP instruction set, the unified instruction pipeline to decode and initiate the RISC instructions when the DSP instructions are inactive, and to decode and initiate the DSP instructions when the RISC instructions are inactive.

Unified shared pipeline allowing deactivation of RISC/DSP units for power saving

Bus state keepers to maintain a steady state of an inactive bus to conserve power. In one embodiment of the invention, the bus state keepers include a plurality of multiplexers and a plurality of flip flops. The plurality of flip flops to store a state of a bus in response to a select signal.

Bus state keepers

A loop buffer for storing and holding instructions executed within loops for digital signal processing. Control logic detects the beginning and ending of a loop to signal the loop buffer control logic to start instruction execution in a cyclical fashion using the instructions stored within the loop buffer. After completion of the required number of loops, the instructions in the loop buffer are overwritten with new instructions until the next loop is to be processed. The loop buffer conserves power by avoiding the fetching of instructions unnecessarily from memory.

Method and apparatus for loop buffering digital signal processing instructions

In one embodiment, a bus multiplexer is between a memory and a functional unit of the integrated circuit. An input of the bus multiplexer couples to a global bus having a bit width. A local bus having a lesser bit width couples to an output of the bus multiplexer. The bus multiplexer selectively multiplexes bits of data on the global bus onto bits of the local bus. In another embodiment, an integrated circuit comprises a memory, a global bus, and a functional unit coupled together. The functional unit includes a bus multiplexer with an input coupled to the global bus, and a local bus coupled to an output of the bus multiplexer. The bus width of the local bus is less than that of the global bus. The bus multiplexer selects data from a subset of bits of the global bus to couple onto the bits of the local bus.

Growing community of inventors

Norco, CA, United States of America

Kenneth Malich