Optimization of Memory Organization and Hierarchy for Decreased Size and Power in Video and Image Processing Systems

Video and image processing applications deal with large amounts of data which have to be stored and transferred. As the initial system specification describing these data manipulations heavily influences the final memory organisation and hierarchy, there is a clear need for exploration support. We believe that the emphasis should lie on fast but accurate estimation and on the high-level steering of the involved system transformations. In this paper, a system exploration environment, called ATOMIUM, is presented that supports these requirements. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, two realistic demonstrators are worked out and design results are described. 1 Introduction For most video and image processing applications there are many ways to realize the multi-dimensional data involved in terms of a specific memory organization and memory partitioning. As reported by system designers this choice is mainly based on "cost" measures such as the number of board-level components..