Computation of Storage Requirements for Multi-Dimensional Signal Processing Applications

Many integrated circuit systems, particularly in the multimedia and telecom domains, are inherently data dominant. For this class of systems, a large part of the power consumption is due to the data storage and data transfer. Moreover, a significant part of the chip area is occupied by memory. The computation of the memory size is an important step in the system-level exploration, in the early stage of designing an optimized (for area and/or power) memory architecture for this class of systems. This paper presents a novel nonscalar approach for computing exactly the minimum size of the data memory for high-level procedural specifications of multidimensional signal processing applications. In contrast with all the previous works which are estimation methods, this approach can perform exact memory computations even for applications with numerous and complex array references, and also with large numbers of scalars