Design space exploration of cache memory — A survey

Cache memory plays a major role in memory hierarchy for improving the system performance. Cache configuration includes cache size, associativity, block size, replacement policy and write policies. Selection of different values for all these parameters decide the performance, energy consumption and chip area of the system for the given application. Finding the best cache configuration for application involves the cache design space exploration. Cache design space is time consuming because it contains all combination of cache parameters. This paper surveys different techniques to find the efficient design space aimed at reducing the design space time and provide good insight to researchers to explore further.