System-level exploration tool for energy-aware memory management in the design of multidimensional signal processing systems

Many signal processing systems, particularly in the multimedia and telecom domains, are synthesized to execute data-dominated applications. In such systems, data transfer and storage have a significant impact on both the system performance and the major cost parameters -- power consumption and chip area. This paper presents a software tool for system-level exploration, where several memory management tasks are addressed in a common theoretical framework. The tool can compute the minimum storage requirement of a given application and can produce the graph of storage variation during the code execution; it offers memory allocation and signal assignment solutions both for flat and hierarchical organizations and optimizes the dynamic energy consumption in the memory subsystem.