SAMOSA: Scratchpad aware mapping of streaming applications

Scratchpad memories have now emerged as an alternative to caches for energy constrained embedded systems. However, effectively mapping data on them while considering energy/timing trade-offs remains a challenge. We present SAMOSA as a technique for mapping streaming applications to scratchpad based MPSoCs. The contribution of this approach is a representation and transformation of the mapping problems - buffer dimensioning and allocation - to a constraint-based optimization problem. SAMOSA was used to explore energy-execution time trade-offs for mapping the H.264 decoder to a scratchpad-based MPSoC. Results show that scratchpad awareness has significant impacts on the energy-execution time trade-offs.