Hardware support for real-time embedded multiprocessor system-on-a-chip memory management

• Authors: Mohamed Shalan;Vincent J. Mooney, III
• Venue: Proceedings of the tenth international symposium on Hardware/software codesign
• Year: 2002

The aggressive evolution of the semiconductor industry --- smaller process geometries, higher densities, and greater chip complexity --- has provided design engineers the means to create complex high-performance Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. Such SoC designs typically have more than one processor and huge memory, all on the same chip. Dealing with the global on- chip memory allocation/de-allocation in a dynamic yet deterministic way is an important issue for the upcoming billion transistor multiprocessor SoC designs. To achieve this, we propose a memory management hierarchy we call Two-Level Memory Management. To implement this memory management scheme --- which presents a paradigm shift in the way designers look at on-chip dynamic memory allocation --- we present a System-on-a-Chip Dynamic Memory Management Unit (SoCDMMU) for allocation of the global on-chip memory, which we refer to as Level Two memory management (Level One is the operating system management of memory allocated to a particular on-chip Processing Element). In this way, processing elements (heterogeneous or non-heterogeneous hardware or software) in an SoC can request and be granted portions of the global memory in a fast and deterministic time (for an example of a four processing element SoC, the dynamic memory allocation of the global on-chip memory takes sixteen cycles per allocation/deallocation in the worst case). In this paper, we show how to modify an existing Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) to support the new proposed SoCDMMU. Our example shows a multiprocessor SoC that utilizes the SoCDMMU has 440% overall speedup of the application transition time over fully shared memory that does not utilize the SoCDMMU.