Memory communication network exploration for low-power distributed memory organisations

Minimising the energy consumption due to the data storage and transfer in data-dominated systems is critical for the design of embedded systems. Distributed memory organisations have been proposed as an efficient storage architecture alternative. However, the impact of the interconnect overhead in these has been traditionally neglected, which is not acceptable any more for deep sub-micron technologies. In this paper, we propose combining the exploration of the memory organisation with the exploration of the communication network and highlight its importance compared to the independent local explorations. This combined exploration can provide gains of 30% in the overall energy consumption of both the memory and its interconnection network design methodologies.