SPM-Based Boot Loader

Nowadays, boot loader becomes more and more important in system, especially the embedded systems which are widely used in different field. Also, many complicated functions have been and will be integrated into boot loader. However, traditional boot loader in embedded system is located in flash or memory which is much slow. The system-on-a-chip technology provides the scratch-pad memory (SPM), which is small, isolated and located on a single chip. It is possible to make use of the SPM in boot loader to boot a system much faster. In this paper, we present a new way of loading process of operating system. Most of boot loaderpsilas work is assigned to another loader- SPMOS loader. It locates in SPM, which provides much faster access than SDRAM and FLASH. The experiment results show that the whole loading process based on SPMOS is fast and efficient.