SARA: StreAm register allocation

Abstract

Low power design criteria for embedded systems have lead to many innovative architectures. One of the core architectural changes that have come in the recent past are streaming registers. These architectures have been shown to be both power efficient and performance efficient. However code has to be efficiently mapped on them to make maximal use of their potential. This paper introduces a novel technique for compiling C code on streaming registers. The proposed technique not only uses the temporal locality in arrays but also spatial locality to map code on streaming registers. The proposed Stream Register Allocation (SARA) technique is also shown to provide good mapping efficiency as well as it is shown to be scalable on realistic applications.