System-level data-format exploration for dynamically allocated data structures

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems Vol. 20; no. 12; pp. 1469 - 1472
• Main Authors: Ellervee, P., Miranda, M., Catthoor, F., Hemani, A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2001; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Application software; Application specific integrated circuits; Asynchronous transfer mode; Bandwidth; Data analysis; Data structures; Design engineering; Design optimization; Digital signal processing chips; Dynamical systems; Dynamics; Energy consumption; Exploration; Keys; Protocols; Reduction; system-level data-format exploration; memory organization; asynchronous transfer mode; dynamically allocated data structure; data structures; telecommunication computing; asynchronous transfer mode cell processing
• ISSN: 0278-0070; 1937-4151; 1937-4151
• DOI: 10.1109/43.969440

System-level exploration of memory organizations is a key issue in successful implementation of data dominated applications based on dynamically allocated data structures involving records and access keys. This paper presents a formalized technique for exploring different memory data-format alternatives when only the system level functional behavior of the application has been defined. Our data-format exploration approach allows to substantially minimize the number of accessed bits by rearranging the format of the data records. The technique exploits parallelism in the data transfer by analyzing the dependencies between data-record accesses. As a result, significant reduction in memory size, bandwidth, and power are obtained. We have validated our techniques using several real-life asynchronous transfer mode cell processing applications, where we have obtained reductions in memory size (up to 20%), power (up to a 60%), and bandwidth.