Memory access driven storage assignment for variables in embedded system design

ABSTRACT

It has been reported and verified in many design experiences that a judicious utilization of the page/burst access modes supported by DRAMs contributes a great reduction in not only the DRAM access latency but also DRAM's energy consumption. Recently, researchers showed that a careful arrangment of data variables in memory directly leads to a maximum utilization of the page/burst access modes for the variable accesses, but unfortunately, found that the problems are not tractable, consequently, resorting to simple (e.g., greedy) heuristic solutions to the problems. In this paper, to improve the quality of existing solutions, we propose a new storage assignement technique, called zone_alignment, for variables, which effectively exploits an efficient 0-1 ILP formulation and the temporal locality of variables' accesses in code.

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