In modern embedded microprocessor

power consumption caused by instruction cache is significant.A strategy of low power consumption set-associate instruction cache based on way-access track is proposed. Redundant hit checks and accesses of unrelated data array are eliminated by establishing and maintaining wayaccess track record using modified instruction cache and branch target buffer.Moreover

various way-access track record maintaining strategies

which include pointers to inter-line-access progenitor

states of transfer-access progenitor

pointers to transfer-access progenitor and indexes of transfer targets

is proposed to reduce reestablishment of track record

which improve the utilization of these records.Experiments show that compared with traditional instruction cache

way-access track instruction cache achieves a great reduction of accesses of tag and data

which is only 3.60 % and 27.70 % of traditional instruction cache.