Improving the EÆciency of Memory Partitioning by Address Clustering

Memory partitioning is an eective approach to memory energy optimization in embedded systems. Spatial local-ity of the memory address prole is the key property that partitioning exploits to determine an eÆcient multi-bank memory architecture. This paper presents an approach, called address clustering, for increasing the locality of a given memory access prole, and thus improving the eÆciency of partitioning. Results obtained on several embedded applications running on an ARM7 core show average energy reductions of 25% (maximum 57%) w.r.t. a partitioned memory architecture synthesized without resorting to address clustering.