AUTOMATIC DSP CACHE MEMORY MANAGEMENT AND FAST PROTOTYPING FOR MULTIPROCESSOR IMAGE APPLICATIONS
Fabrice Urban, Mickaël Raulet, Jean François Nezan, Olivier Déforges · 2006
Image and video processing applications represent a great challenge in terms of real-time embedded systems. Pro-grammable multicomponent architectures can provide suit-able target solutions combining flexibility and computation power. On-chip memory size limitation forces the use of ex-ternal memory. Its relatively small bandwidth induces per-formance loss which can be limited by the use of an efficient data access scheme. Cache mechanism offers a good trade-off between efficiency and programming complexity. How-ever in a multicomponent context data consistency has to be ensured. The aim of our work is to develop a fast and au-tomatic prototyping methodology dedicated to deterministic signal processing applications and their multicomponent im-plementations. This methodology directly generates distrib-uted executives for various platforms from a high level ap-plication description. This paper presents the improvement provided by cache memory in the design process. Cache is automatically managed in multicomponent implementations, thus reducing development time. The improvement is illus-trated by image processing applications. 1.