Synthesis of partitioned shared memory architectures for energy-sufficient multi-processor SoC

Abstract

Accesses to the shared memory in multi-processor systems-on-chip represent a significant performance bottleneck. Multi-port memories are a common solution to this problem, because they allow parallel accesses. However, they are not an energy-efficient solution. We propose an energy-efficient shared-memory architecture that can be used as a substitute for multi-port memories, which is based on an application-driven partitioning of the shared address space into a multi-bank architecture. Experiments on a set of parallel benchmarks show energy savings of about 56% with respect to a dual-port memory architecture, at a very limited performance penalty.