Managing hybrid on-chip scratchpad and cache memories for multi-tasking embedded systems

On-chip memory management is essential in design of high performance and energy-efficient embedded systems. While many off-the-shelf embedded processors employ a hybrid on-chip SRAM architecture including both scratchpad memories (SPMs) and caches, many existing work on SPM management ignore the synergy between caches and SPMs. In this work, we propose a static SPM allocation strategy for the hybrid on-chip memory architecture in a multi-tasking environment, which minimizes the overall access latency and energy consumption of the instruction memory subsystem. We capture cache conflict misses via a fine-grained temporal cache behavior model. An integer linear programming (ILP) based formulation is proposed to generate an function-level SPM allocation scheme, where both intra- and inter-task cache interference as well as access frequency are captured for an optimal memory subsystem design. Compared with the state-of-the-art static SPM allocation strategy in a multitasking environment, experimental results show that our SPM management scheme achieves 30.51% further improvement in instruction memory subsystem performance, and up to 34.92% in terms of energy saving.