Energy saving for memory with loop scheduling and prefetching

Many high-performance DSP processors employ multi-module on-chip memory to improve performance and power consumption. This architectural feature supports higher memory bandwidth by allowing multiple data memory accesses to be executed in parallel. However, making effective use of multiple memory modules remains difficult, considering the combined effect of performance and power requirement. This paper studies the scheduling and assignment problem that minimizes the total energy while satisfying erformance for applications with loops. An algorithm, LSAMEM (Loop Scheduling and Assignment to Minimize Energy for Memory), is proposed. The algorithm attempts to maximum energy saving while satisfying timing constraint with guaranteed probability. The experimental results show that the average improvement on energy-saving is significant by using LSAMEM.