Design Exploration for Memory-Intensive Embedded Systems

这项研究是技术，以支持早期的系统级探索的内存密集型行为的多媒体应用程序，如视频和图像处理。除了内存之外，系统性能、功耗和总成本也是需要考虑的限制因素。在这种方法下开发的技术和工具用于：（1）在资源、性能和功率约束下根据系统的规范估计存储器需求，使得系统设计者能够权衡计算时间与估计精度;（2）嵌入式系统的规格在面积上的优化，使用粗粒度和细粒度变换的组合的性能和功率约束;以及（3）存储器结构的分区、组织和映射，包括数组、记录和指针，用于将系统规范实现为硬件和软件。这些技术和工具被集成到一个探索环境，允许系统设计人员评估可行的硬件/软件实现内存密集型嵌入式应用程序。

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.