Buffer and register allocation for memory space optimization

In today´s embedded systems, memory hierarchy is rapidly becoming a major factor in terms of power, performance and area. This is especially true for embedded multimedia applications using temporary multi-dimensional arrays that are typically used to store intermediate results during multimedia processing. In this paper, the authors propose a new technique that optimizes the use of caches and registers. It consists in combining buffer and register allocation to reduce the size of the temporary arrays. The authors use the concept of live data to replace each array by a smaller buffer. The authors then replace references to this buffer by registers. The experiments are made on a Unix environment and on the StepNP simulator. The results show that the technique yields significant reduction of the number of data cache misses