This book provides a systematic and unified methodology, including basic principles and reusable processes, for dynamic memory management (DMM) in embedded systems. The authors describe in detail how to design and optimize the use of dynamic memory in modern, multimedia and network applications, targeting the latest generation of portable embedded systems, such as smartphones. Coverage includes a variety of design and optimization topics in electronic design automation of DMM, from high-level software optimization to microarchitecture-level hardware support. The authors describe the design of multi-layer dynamic data structures for the final memory hierarchy layers of the target portable embedded systems and how to create a low-fragmentation, cost-efficient, dynamic memory management subsystem out of configurable components for the particular memory allocation and de-allocation patterns for each type of application. The design methodology described in this book is based on propagating constraints among design decisions from multiple abstraction levels (both hardware and software) and customizing DMM according to application-specific data access and storage behaviors.

This book provides a systematic and unified methodology, including basic principles and reusable processes, for dynamic memory management (DMM) in embedded systems. The authors describe in detail how to design and optimize the use of dynamic memory in modern, multimedia and network applications, targeting the latest generation of portable embedded systems, such as smartphones. Coverage includes a variety of design and optimization topics in electronic design automation of DMM, from high-level software optimization to microarchitecture-level hardware support. The authors describe the design of multi-layer dynamic data structures for the final memory hierarchy layers of the target portable embedded systems and how to create a low-fragmentation, cost-efficient, dynamic memory management subsystem out of configurable components for the particular memory allocation and de-allocation patterns for each type of application. The design methodology described in this book is based on propagating constraints among design decisions from multiple abstraction levels (both hardware and software) and customizing DMM according to application-specific data access and storage behaviors.

Modern mobile embedded systems are composed of a combination of software and hardware modules, capable of offering a variety of applications. They also communicate to other devices in a mostly wireless way. To ensure a good user experience, these devices require a long battery life. For this, they have to be extremely energy efficient. While part of that efficiency is the responsibility of the hardware platform designers, a large part is related to how the software designers utilize the underlying hardware. This is especially true for the data memory hierarchy. Modern multimedia applications exhibit a very dynamic use of that memory hierarchy, depending on the actual input conditions. To keep track of which memory contains which piece of data, they utilize dynamic data structures and dynamic memory managers. This thesis focuses on optimizing the behaviour of such modern multimedia applications in terms of their data memory usage.