A Time, Energy, and Area Efficient Domain Wall Memory-Based SPM for Embedded Systems

Abstract

Applications that run in the embedded systems normally should be finished within a timing constraint in energy-efficient fashion. Due to these two requirements, the embedded systems often employ software-controlled scratch pad memory (SPM) instead of hardware-controlled cache as their on-chip memory. The data accesses in SPMs are controlled purely by the software, which provides better time-predictability and precise time-control. In this paper, we propose a time, energy, and area efficient domain wall memory (DWM)-based SPM for embedded systems. To efficiently manage this type of novel SPM, an integer nonlinear programming formulation and the instructions group schedule algorithm are proposed to generate memory access instruction scheduling and data placement. In addition, the longest move reduce algorithm is also proposed to configure different types of DWM memory cells to achieve minimal area size. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can generate a configuration of DWM-based SPM with minimal area size while satisfying time constraint.