Abstract

This paper presents a technique for the efficient compiler management of software-exposed heterogeneous memory. In many lower-end embedded chips, often used in micro-controllers and DSP processors, heterogeneous memory units such as scratch-pad SRAM, internal DRAM, external DRAM and ROM are visible directly to the software, without automatic management by a hardware caching mechanism. Instead the memory units are mapped to different portions of the address space. Caches are avoided because of their cost and power consumption, and because they make it difficult to guarantee real-time performance. For this important class of embedded chips, the allocation of data to different memory units to maximize performance is the responsibility of the software

Citations