An integrated hardware/software approach for run-time scratchpad management

ABSTRACT

An ever increasing number of dynamic interactive applications are implemented on portable consumer electronics. Designers depend largely on operating systems to map these applications on the architecture. However, today's embedded operating systems abstract away the precise architectural details of the platform. As a consequence, they cannot exploit the energy efficiency of scratchpad memories. We present in this paper a novel integrated hardware/software solution to support scratchpad memories at a high abstraction level. We exploit hardware support to alleviate the transfer cost from/to the scratchpad memory and at the same time provide a high-level programming interface for run-time scratchpad management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a case-study.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.0 GENERAL
      Subjects: Hardware/software interfaces

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Design studies

General Terms:
Measurement, Performance, Verification

Keywords:
AMBA AHB, DMA, dynamic allocation, scratchpad