Simple Offset Assignment in Presence of Subword Data

Many embedded architectures support indirect addressing mode with autoincrement/autodecrement. By maximizing the use of this mode, generation of explicit instructions for performing address arithmetic can be avoided and thus reductions in code size and improvements in performance are achieved. Bartley [2] and Liao et al. [16] developed a method for finding a storage layout for program variables so that the use of autoincrement/autodecrement could be maximized. They introduced the Simple Offset Assignment (SOA) problem and solved it using a Path Cover (PC) formulation. We observe that many media and network processing applications make extensive use of subword data. Therefore, for such applications, by packing multiple subword variables into a single word, we can generate storage layouts that further reduce the cost of address arithmetic in two ways. First the need for address arithmeti