Methodology for Refinement and Optimisation of Dynamic Memory Management for Embedded Systems in Multimedia Applications

In multimedia applications, run-time memory management support has to allow real-time memory de/allocation, retrieving and processing of data. Thus, its implementation must be designed to combine high speed, low power, large data storage capacity and a high memory bandwidth. In this paper, we assess the performance of our new system-level exploration methodology to optimise the memory management of typical multimedia applications in an extensively used 3D reconstruction image system [1, 2]. This methodology is based on an analysis of the number of memory accesses, normalised memory footprint¹ and energy estimations for the system studied. This results in an improvement of normalised memory footprint up to 44.2% and the estimated energy dissipation up to 22.6% over conventional static memory implementations in an optimised version of the driver application. Finally, our final version is able to scale perfectly the memory consumed in the system for a wide range of input parameters whereas the statically optimised version is unable to do this.The original version of this paper first appeared in the Proceedings of Signal Processing Systems 2003.Marc Leeman has as professional research interests hardware/software co-design, code optimisation in general and optimisation of dynamic data types and dynamic memory management for low power embedded systems in particular. Personal interests include Open and Free software development, software configuration and GNU/Debian package maintenance. He received an engineering degree, a master in artificial intelligence and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1997, 1998 and 2004 respectively, all at the K.U. Leuven. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society. Currently, he works as an R&D Engineer for Barco Control-rooms Division (BCD) on hardware/software co-design for streaming video products.David Atienza received the M.Sc. degree in Computer Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain in 2001. Since then he has joined the Department of Computer Architecture and Automation of Complutense University of Madrid as a sandwich Ph.D. student half-time at the Inter-university Micro-Electronics Centre (IMEC), Heverlee, Belgium. His research interests include optimisation of dynamic memory management on multimedia and wireless network applications for low power and high performance embedded systems, computer architecture and high-level design automation.Geert Deconinck is Associate Professor (hoofddocent) at the K.U. Leuven (Belgium) since 2003 and staff member of the research group ELECTA (Electrical Energy and Computing Architectures). His research interests include the design and assessment of software-based solutions to meet dependability, real-time, and cost constraints for embedded systems. In this field, he has authored and co-authored more than 120 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. He received his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and his Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from the K.U. Leuven, Belgium in 1991 and 1996 respectively. He was a visiting professor (bijzonder gastdocent) at the K.U. Leuven in 1999–2003. - Flanders (Belgium) in the period 1997–2003.Vincenzo De Florio received his MSc degree in computer science in 1987 and his PhD degree in engineering in 2000, respectively from the University of Bari, Italy, and the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is currently post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, where he is doing research on adaptive and dependable mobile applications. Previously he had been researcher and lecturer with Tecnopolis/SASIAM (ECMI School for Advanced Studies in Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and member of Tecnopolis/Robotic lab, where he was responsible for design of parallel robotic vision applications. Currently he is also a reviewer for several conferences and for the Journal of System Architectures.José M. Mendías received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1992 and 1998, respectively. He joined the Department of Computer Architecture and Systems Engineering, Complutense University in 1992 as a lecturer, and became an associate professor in 2001. Since 2002, he is Vice-dean of the Computer Science Faculty at the same University. His current research interests include design automation, computer architecture and formal methods.Chantal Ykman-Couvreur is born in 1956. She received the mathematics degree from the Facultes Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix of Namur in 1979. She first worked at PHILIPS Research Laboratory of Belgium, from 1979 until 1991. Her main activities were concentrated on information theory and coding, cryptography and multi-level logic synthesis for VLSI circuits. Then, she joined IMEC, where she was responsible at IMEC for the dynamic memory management and the system-level design flow in the Matisse compiler for network protocol components (ATM, Internet Protocol, etc). Currently, she works on the task concurrency management design flow in the Matador project.Francky Catthoor received the engineering degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 1982 and 1987 respectively. Since 1987, he has headed several research domains in the area of high-level and system synthesis techniques and architectural methodologies, all within the Design Technology for Integrated Information and Telecom Systems (DESICS—formerly VSDM) division at the Inter-university Micro-Electronics Centre (IMEC), Heverlee, Belgium. Currently he is an IMEC fellow. He is part-time full professor at the EE department of the K.U. Leuven.In 1986 he received the Young Scientist Award from the Marconi International Fellowship Council. He has been associate editor for several IEEE and ACM journals, like Transactions on VLSI Signal Processing, Transactions on Multi-media, and ACM TODAES. He was the program chair of several conferences including ISSS97 and SIPS01.Rudy Lauwereins is vice-president of IMEC, Belgiums Interuniversity Micro-Electronic Centre, which performs research and development, ahead of industrial needs by 3 to 10 years, in microelectronics, nano-technology, enabling design methods and technologies for ICT systems. He leads the DESICS division of 185 researchers, currently focused on the development of re-configurable architectures, design methods and tools for wireless and multimedia applications. He is also a part-time Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He had obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1989. Rudy Lauwereins served in numerous international program committees and organisational committees, and gave many invited and keynote speeches. He is vice-chair of the board of DSP Valley and member of the board of several spin-off companies. He is a senior member of the IEEE.