Parallel Memory Architecture for Application-Specific Instruction-Set Processors

Abstract

Many of the current applications used in battery powered devices are from digital signal processing, telecommunication, and multimedia domains. These applications typically set high requirements for computational performance and often parallelism is the key solution to meet the performance requirements. In order to exploit the parallel processing units, memory should be able to feed the data path with data. This calls for a memory organization supporting parallel memory accesses. In this paper, a conflict resolving parallel data memory system for application-specific instruction-set processors is described. The memory structure is generic and reusable to support various application-specific designs. The proposed memory system does not employ any predefined access format signals for memory addressing. The proposed parallel memory system is attached to an application-specific instruction-set processor core and comparison on area, power, and critical path are shown. The experiments show that significant power savings can be obtained by exploiting the parallel memory system instead of multiport memory.

Low-power Programmable Processor for Fast Fourier Transform Based on Transport Triggered Architecture

“…In fact, two single-port memories are used and connected to the LSUs via an added logic, which provides a conflict-free memory access. The parallel memory system was chosen due to a lower power consumption of single-port memories compared to multi-port memories [15].…”

Low-Power Application-Specific Processor for FFT Computations

“…However, in this work, we are tailoring the processor for FFT computations, thus we have a priori information about the access patterns and here we use the simple parity scheme proposed in [3]. The parallel memory organization provides energy-efficiency compared to multi-port memories as we discussed earlier in [22].…”

An Efficient Memory Organization for High-ILP Inner Modem Baseband SDR Processors

“…skewing schemes) have been proposed in the past, such as [27,28,35], of which some are much more complex than our simple bank rotation schemes. Harper et al [14] proposed a dynamic rotation scheme, in which special instructions can set the specific form of rotation for each loop.…”