Guaranteeing on- and off-chip communication in embedded systems

With the ongoing advancement in VLSI technology, the performance of an embedded system is no longer determined primarily by the number and speed of functional units, but by the communication of data and instructions. This results not only in on-chip memory and caching schemes, but also in new methods for on- and off-chip communication. In this paper we present new communication and arbitration schemes that exploit the characteristics of continuous “media” streams, while minimizing the latency for random (e.g., CPU) memory access to background memory. A key result of the methods is the ability to easily guarantee the bandwidth for real-time tasks in a true multi-processor system