An automatic scratch pad memory management tool and MPEG-4 encoder case study
Rogier Baert, Eddy De Greef, Erik Brockmeyer · 2008
Using software-controlled Scratch-Pad Memory (SPM) in Systems-on-Chip has the potential of reducing power consumption by using design-time application knowledge to reduce memory accesses and processor stalls. This paper presents a fully automatic application analysis and transformation tool which selects data-structures for transfer to the SPM and schedules data transfers between background memory and SPM (pre-fetching) to achieve both high performance and low power consumption. A case study applying this tool on an MPEG-4 video encoder shows an overall power reduction of 25%, a 40% power reduction in just the memories and a 40% reduction in processor cycles as compared to an optimized hardware-cache based solution.