Design Exploration for Memory-Intensive Embedded Systems

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This research is on techniques to support early system-level exploration of memory-intensive behaviors for multimedia applications such as video and image processing. In addition to memory, system performance, power consumption and total cost are constraints being considered. Techniques and tools being developed under this approach are for: (1) estimation of memory requirements from the system's specification under resource, performance and power constraints, enabling a tradeoff of computation time against estimation accuracy by system designers; (2) optimization of the embedded system's specification under area, performance and power constraints using a combination of coarse-grain and fine-grain transformations; and (3) partitioning, organization, and mapping of memory structures, including arrays, records and pointers, for implementation of the system specification into hardware and software. These techniques and tools are being integrated into an exploration environment which permits system designers to evaluate feasible hardware/software implementations of memory-intensive embedded applications.