A novel reconfigurable scratchpad memory for audio applications on cost-effective SoC

Nowadays, the scratchpad memories (SPMs) are widely used as supplements or even alternatives for cache memories in audio applications on cost-effective SoCs. However, traditional SPM architectures encounter limitations of tight capacities and restricted data exchange methods with main memories. Such kinds of limitations significantly decrease the performance of the whole system, since most of the audio applications require high-capacity memory modules and flexible data transfer methods. To overcome the weaknesses of traditional SPMs, a novel reconfigurable SPM (RSPM) has been proposed in this paper. The outstanding advantage of the proposed RSPM is that a succession of data transfers is accomplished by the RSPM independently, and the performance of the whole system are effectively enhanced for most of the audio applications. Another attractive feature of RSPM is that the hardware cost of RSPM is independent of the scale/complexity of the target applications. Compared with the d-cache at the same capacity, the performance of the SoC with RSPM for audio computing kernel benchmarks are improved by up to 26.7%. Meanwhile, to achieve the same processing efficiency for the audio benchmarks, the area overheads of traditional SPMs are up to 7.2 times larger than the RSPM. Besides, the explorations of two complete sample audio applications show that the performance of the SoC solution with 1KB RSPM cooperating with 1KB d-cache is even better than the SoC solution with pure 16-KB d-cache, which is of much larger hardware cost. All the advanced features of RSPM make it more attractive than traditional SPMs, and make the SoC solutions cost-effective for most of the audio applications.