Energy-aware memory management for embedded multidimensional signal processing applications

Abstract

In real-time data-intensive multimedia processing applications, data transfer and storage significantly influence, if not dominate, all the major cost parameters of the design space—namely energy consumption, performance, and chip area. This paper presents an electronic design automation (EDA) methodology for the high-level design of hierarchical memory architectures in embedded data-intensive applications, mainly in the area of multidimensional signal processing. Different from the previous works, the problems of data assignment to the memory layers, of mapping the signals into the physical memories, and of banking the on-chip memory are addressed in a consistent way, based on the same formal model. This memory management framework employs techniques specific to the integral polyhedra based dependence analysis. The main design target is the reduction of the static and dynamic energy consumption in the hierarchical memory subsystem.