Introduction to the ATOMIUM tool suite for memory centric code optimization Abstract The Data Transfer and Storage Exploration (DTSE) methodology has been developed to address the memory-related aspects of system design. This methodology has proven its worth in practice many times. However, to take full advantage of the methodology, both in-depth analysis and extensive transformations of the application's program code are required. Applying this without the assistance of CAD support can therefore be tedious, error prone, and time consuming. This is why IMEC develops tool support for the DTSE methodology in the form of the ATOMIUM tool suite (http://www.imec.be/atomium). ATOMIUM operates at the behavioral level of an application, expressed in C. The output is a transformed C description, functionally equivalent to the original one, but typically leading to strongly reduced memory size and power consumption. ATOMIUM has been applied successfully to: •   Assess the implementation complexity of the emerging H.264 / MPEG-4 part 10 video coding standard. • Reduce the memory cost of the specification of an MPEG-4 video decoder with a factor 4 to 10 (with a resulting speed-up of a factor 6 to 20). •   Reduce the dominant memory power consumption of a turbo coding based telecom system to 480 mW. This workshop is supported by STARC. Objectives •   To demonstrate emerging tools supporting the most tedious and error-prone exploration steps of memory organization optimizations. • To train designers to use these tools in an efficient, real-life applicable design flow. •   To create awareness of how these tools fit in an overall methodology for exploring and optimizing the memory organization. • Target audience   This course is expected to be of interest to:   1.   Industry engineers and technical managers pursuing low-power low-cost implementations for data-dominated applications under real-time constraints. Especially system, algorithm and architecture designers will benefit from this course.   2. Researchers who are interested in learning about these promising new research avenues which are complementary to the traditional research topics. • Workshop dates   9 and 10 January 2003: Workshop at NEC   15 and 16 January 2003: Workshop at Matsushita • Workshop fee   The fee for the 2-day workshop is ¥ 20.000 per participant. • Program   Day 1   9h30  Introduction The IMEC research institute (http://www.imec.be) and its DESICS division are first introduced. Then, an overview is given of the DESICS developments in the field of design technology.   10h30  Data transfer and storage: the main power and performance bottleneck in multimedia applications In this session the power consumption and performance requirements of today's multimedia and telecom applications are analyzed. The memories and their accesses turn out to be the main bottleneck. It is shown on several demonstrators that this bottleneck can be largely removed by systematic exploration of the data transfer and storage issues.   12h00  Lunch   13h30  Data Transfer and Storage Exploration tutorial The basic principles of the Data Transfer and Storage Exploration (DTSE) methodology are discussed. The different steps of DTSE are introduced and results of DTSE designs are presented.   15h00  The ATOMIUM/Analysis tool (including hands-on) TATOMIUM/Analysis allows designers to identify the memory-related hot spots in today's demanding multimedia and wireless applications. It provides an excellent way to steer the optimizations needed to design quality products with a small time-to-market, as it operates at the behavioral level. It is consequently extremely useful for guiding designs that are still at the specification level toward incorporating the best properties with respect to ease of implementation. The ATOMIUM tools will be applied to a color conversion application during the hands-on part of this workshop.   17h00  End of first day   Day 2   9h00  The ATOMIUM Storage Bandwidth Optimization tool ATOMIUM/SBO (Storage Bandwidth Optimization) allows designers to explore the effect of timing constraints on the required memory architecture and translates these timing constraints into optimized memory architecture constraints. This information is very useful when defining a power and area efficient memory architecture that provides sufficient storage bandwidth to meet the application's timing constraints.   10h30  The ATOMIUM Memory Compaction tool ATOMIUM/MC (Memory Compaction) allows designers to automatically optimize the storage order of multi-dimensional data with the goal of reusing memory locations as much as possible, hence reducing the required memory sizes and power consumption for the application. This is especially useful for today's memory-hungry multimedia applications. An additional benefit of the reduced memory-space requirements achieved by ATOMIUM/MC is that cache hit rates can increase considerably.   12h00  Lunch   13h30  Hands-on ATOMIUM/SBO and ATOMIUM/MC The ATOMIUM/SBO and ATOMIUM/MC tools will be applied to a color conversion application in this hands-on session.   16h30  Evaluation of the workshop   17h00  End of first day • Prerequisites   This course is expected to be of interest to:   •   Basics of C programming are required.   • A limited knowledge of multimedia application background will make it easier to understand the application demonstrators.