Loop scheduling and bank type assignment for heterogeneous multi-bank memory

Many high-performance DSP processors employ multi-bank on-chip memory to improve performance and energy consumption. This architectural feature supports higher memory bandwidth by allowing multiple data memory accesses to be executed in parallel. However, making effective use of multi-bank memory remains difficult, considering the combined effect of performance and energy requirement. This paper studies the scheduling and assignment problem about how to minimize the total energy consumption while satisfying the timing constraint with heterogeneous multi-bank memory for applications with loop. An algorithm, TASL (Type Assignment and Scheduling for Loops), is proposed. The algorithm uses bank type assignment with the consideration of variable partition to find the best configuration for both memory and ALU. The experimental results show that the average improvement on energy-saving is significant by using TASL. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.