Parallel Memory Architecture for Application-Specific Instruction-Set Processors

Many of the current applications used in battery powered devices are from digital signal processing, telecommunication, and multimedia domains. These applications typically set high requirements for computational performance and often parallelism is the key solution to meet the performance requirements. In order to exploit the parallel processing units, memory should be able to feed the data path with data. This calls for a memory organization supporting parallel memory accesses. In this paper, a conflict resolving parallel data memory system for application-specific instruction-set processors is described. The memory structure is generic and reusable to support various application-specific designs. The proposed memory system does not employ any predefined access format signals for memory addressing. The proposed parallel memory system is attached to an application-specific instruction-set processor core and comparison on area, power, and critical path are shown. The experiments show that significant power savings can be obtained by exploiting the parallel memory system instead of multi-port memory.