An integrated hardware/software approach for run-time scratchpad management

An ever increasing number of dynamic interactive applications are implemented on portable consumer electronics. Designers depend largely on operating systems to map these applications on the arre. However, today's embedded operating systems abstract away the precise architectural details of the platform. As a consequence, they cannot exploit the energy efficiency of scratchpad memories. We present in this paper a novel integrated hardware/software solution to support scratchpad memories at a high ion level. We exploit hardware support to alleviate the transfer cost from/to the scratchpad memory and at the same time provide a high-level programming interface for run-time scratchpad management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a case-study. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.0 [General]: Hardware/software interfaces; C.3 [Specialpurpose and Application-based Systems]: Real-time and embedded systems; C.4 [Performance of Systems]: Design studies General Terms:M...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Francesco Poletti, Paul Marchal, David Atienza, Luca Benini, Francky Catthoor, Jose Manuel Mendias
• Keywords: DAC 2004, Design Automation, Run-time Scratchpad Management, Scratchpad Memories, Scratchpad Memory