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

• DOI: 10.1145/996566.996634
• Publication Date: 2004-07-20T11:55:38Z
• Authors: Poletti Francesco; Paul Marchal; David Atienza; Luca Benini; Francky Catthoor; Jose M. Mendias
• Keywords: Hardware; software; Embedded systems; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Run-Time; 02 engineering and technology; Dynamic memory management; Scratchpad Management

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.