Multi-Bank Memory Allocation for Multimedia Application

In order to minimize the main memory consumption, a multi-bank architecture is adopted. The main advantage in this architecture is the capability of setting banks in low power modes when they are not accessed, such that only the accessed bank is maintained in active mode. In this paper, an heuristic approach is developed at system level to find, both an efficient allocation of application´s tasks to memory banks, and the corresponding memory configuration that lessen the energy consumption: number of banks and the size of each bank. Experiments on a multimedia application show the effectiveness of this approach.