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

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 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. Such SoC designs typically have more than one processor and huge (tens of Mega Bytes) amount of memory, all on the same chip. Dealing with the global on-chip memory allocation/deallocation in a dynamic yet deterministic way is an important issue for 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 shift in the way designers look at on-chip dynamic memory allocation—we present the 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 management of memory allocated to a particular on-chip Processing Element, e.g., an operating system's management of memory allocated to a particular processor). 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. A new tool is introduced to generate a custom optimized version of the SoCDMMU hardware. Also, a real-time operating system is modified support the new proposed SoCDMMU. We show an example where shared memory multiprocessor SoC that employs the Two-Level Memory Management and utilizes the SoCDMMU has an overall average speedup in application transition time as well as normal execution time.