TTEC: Data Allocation Optimization for Morphable Scratchpad Memory in Embedded Systems

Scratchpad memory (SPM) is widely utilized in many embedded systems as a software-controlled on-chip memory to replace the traditional cache. New non-volatile memory (NVM) has emerged as a promising candidate to replace SRAM in SPM, due to its significant benefits, such as low-power consumption and high performance. In particular, several representative NVMs, such as PCM, ReRAM, and STT-RAM can build multiple-level cells (MLC) to achieve even higher density. Nevertheless, this triggers off higher energy overhead and longer access latency compared with its single-level cell (SLC) counterpart. To address this issue, this paper first proposes a specific SPM with morphable NVM, in which the memory cell can be dynamically programmed to the MLC mode or SLC mode. Considering the benefits of high-density MLC and low-energy SLC, a simple and novel optimization technique, named theory of thermal expansion and contraction, is presented to minimize the energy consumption and access latency in embedded systems. The basic idea is to dynamically adjust the size configure of SLC/MLC in SPM according to the different workloads of program and allocate the optimal storage medium for each data. Therefore, an integer linear programming formulation is first built to produce an optimal SLC/MLC SPM partition and data allocation. In addition, a corresponding approximation algorithm is proposed to achieve near-optimal results in polynomial time. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed technique can effectively improve the system performance and reduce the energy consumption.