LOW-POWER DESIGN OF 8-B EMBEDDED COOLRISC MICROCONTROLLER CORES

Low-power and low-voltage embedded microcontrollers are required more and more for portable applications. Power reduction can be addressed a t the software level as well as at the architecture level while search ing to reduce the number of executed instructions for a given task. An 8-b RISC-like pipelined microcontroller family is presented achieving one clock per instruction. It is compared to various architectures of existing 8-b microcontrollers. According to an efficiency model takin g into account the architecture as well as the number of registers, th e presented 8-b microcontroller cores provide four to ten times better performances than existing microcontrollers. On one hand, the operati ng frequency can be reduced to execute a given task in the same execut ion time. On the other hand, delivering 10 MIPS performance, more than 2000 MIPS/W can be achieved at 3 V.