Processor-memory co-exploration driven by a Memory-Aware Architecture Description Language

Memory represents a major bottleneck in modern embedded systems. Traditionally, memory organizations for programmable systems assumed a fixed cache hierarchy. With the widening processor-memory gap, more aggressive memory technologies and organizations have appeared, allowing customization of a heterogeneous memory architecture tuned for the application. However, such a processor-memory co-exploration approach critically needs the ability to explicitly capture heterogeneous memory architectures. We present in this paper a language-based approach to explicitly capture the memory subsystem configuration, and perform exploration of the memory architecture to trade-off cost versus performance. We present a set of experiments using our Memory-Aware Architectural Description Language to drive the exploration of the memory subsystem for the TIC6211 processor architecture, demonstrating a range of cost and performance attributes.