1 A Novel Technique to Use Scratch-pad Memory for Stack Management

Extensive work has been done for optimal management of scratch-pad memory (SPM) all assuming that the SPM is assigned a fixed address space. The main target objects to be placed on the SPM have been code and global mem-ory since their sizes and locations are not changed dy-namically. We propose a novel idea of dynamic address mapping of SPM with the assistance of memory manage-ment unit (MMU). It allows us to use SPM for stack man-agement without architecture modification and complier assistance. The proposed technique is orthogonal to the previous works so can be used at the same time. Experi-ments results show that the proposed technique results in average performance improvement of 13 % and energy sav-ings of 12 % observed compared to using only external DRAM. And it also gives noticeable speed up and energy saving against a typical cache solution for stack data