Array allocation taking into account SDRAM characteristics

Multimedia, image processing and other signal processing applications often involve data stored in large arrays. Due to chip area limitation, arrays are typically assigned to off-chip memories, such as DRAM. This being the case, we try to optimize off-chip memory accesses to improve performance. We take the characteristics of the current mainstream SDRAM memory into account. We propose an algorithm to allocate arrays to different banks to increase the probability of utilizing SDRAM's multi-bank characteristic. Experimental results show significant improvement over traditional approaches.