An Alternative Choice of Scratch-Pad Memory for Energy Optimization in Embedded System

Effective utilization of on-chip storage space is important to reduction of memory subsystem energy consumptions of embedded systems which are powered by batteries. In the past, cache helps to alleviate this bottleneck to some extent and has been widely used. However, a vital flaw, invalid transmission between on-chip memory and off-chip memory indicates that it may not be the best candidate for portable/embedded devices. Software-managed on-chip memory, which generally is called as scratch-pad memory (SPM) may be a better alternative for exploiting locality, meanwhile, how to efficiently map code & date into SPM is still a problem. In this paper, we propose a strategy which analyzes the application s binary directly and inserts instructions to implement jumping between on-chip and off-chip. Compared with previous work, this strategy not only notices the change of object´s instruction number and size, but also takes the relationship among objects into accounts, the result is more accurate.