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With the trend toward specialization, an efficient memory-path design is vital to capitalize customization in data-path. A monolithic memory hierarchy is often highly inefficient for irregular applications, traditionally targeted for CPUs. New approaches and tools are required to offer application-specific memory customization combining the benefits of cache and scratchpad memory simultaneously.

This paper introduces a novel approach for automated application-specific on-chip memory assignment and tiling. The approach offers two major tools: (1) static memory access analysis and (2) variable-level memory assignment. Static memory analysis performs at the LLVM abstraction. It extracts target-independent pointer behaviors, measures the access strides and analyze the prefetchability of variables. (2) variable-level memory assignment creates a memory allocation graph for memory assignment (cache vs. scratchpad …