WCET-Aware Stack Frame Management of Embedded Systems Using Scratchpad Memories

Scratchpad memories (SPMs) provide a time-predictable alternative to caches but requires explicit management in the code. When the call stack is stored in the SPM, stack frames need to be evicted to and restored from the main memory to avoid stack overflow. We propose a technique to find optimal locations in the code to perform stack management operations such that the worst-case execution time (WCET) is minimized.