Data reuse exploration techniques for loop-dominated applications

Abstract

Efficient exploitation of temporal locality in the memory accesses on array signals can have a very large impact art the power consumption in embedded data dominated applications. The effective use of an optimized custom memory hierarchy or a customized software controlled mapping on a predefined hierarchy, is crucial for this. Only recently have effective systematic techniques to deal with this specific design step begun to appear They were still limited in their exploration scope. In this paper we introduce an extended formalized methodology based on an analytical model of the data reuse of a signal. The cost parameters derived from this model define the search space to explore and allow us to exploit the maximum data reuse possible. The result is an automated design technique to find power efficient memory hierarchies and generate the corresponding optimized code.