Research On Hardware/Software Co-Design Of MD32 Memory System

With the quick development of 1C industry,Digital Signal Processor(DSP) has gained advance in both manufacturing process,architecture,compiler and RTOS. Multimedia application also greatly improve the development of DSP. The special architecture,powerful processing ability,and relative low power consumption make DSP the most suitable one for future multimedia application. This is the background in which MD32 is developed. And in this paper,the design of MD32 memory system is discussed.Being different with general purpose processor,the MD32 is targeted in the multimedia processing,which proposes many challenges to the design of MD32 memory system. First of all,the access time of memory system should be short enough,and it should less than 2.8ns. Second,because of the unusual characteristics of MD32 instruction set,such as MMX and SIMD,the bandwith of the memory system should be wide enough to provide enough data to the powerful processing unit of MD32. Third,the power consumption of MD32 memory system should be small,so that one of the most design target-low power-can be satisfied.In this paper,hardware/software codesign is used to solve die problems. In this paper,we begin with the specification of the system,do the hardware/software partition according to the criteria. In the design of hardware of memory system,the requirements of system software is taken into account;and according to the hardware architecture,a efficient and simple memory management system is designed in the RTOS. And hardware/software coverification is carried out to guarantee the correctness of design.In the design of hardware of memory system,according to the system specification,we select the appropriate memory capacity,SRAM block,associativity and the placement of cache in the pipeline. Similarily,according to the DSP data access pattern and design philosophy of MD32,a data memory combined data cache and data rani is proposed.In the MD32 RTOS,memory management system is one the most important part. According to the characteristics of MD32 MMU,a simple memory protection and sharing merchanical is designed. And the process scheduling is used to manage two tasks to get the performance data,and the result is used to direct the hardware design.With the complexity of SoC design,the necessarily of hardware/software coverification is more and more apparent. In this thesis,a hardware/software coverification environment ICOS is proposed. By embedding Virtual Mornitor and Control Unit (VMCU) into the system prototype,RTOS,IPC,and external tools and console implemented using JAVA,ICOS provide good observability and control. And the application of RTOS make ICOS highly portable.