Exclusive Memory Scheduling for Multimedia MPSoC

Multimedia MPSoC (Multi-Processor System-on-Chip) has been widely used in today´s consumer electronics. As many memory intensive IP (Intellectual Property) cores are integrated into a single chip, the performance of shared memory has been a critical issue. Conventional memory scheduling policies just schedule the existing requests in the queue and waste the potential scheduling space because they don´t use the features of memory access modules. Existing policies often have to take a tradeoff between performance and QoS (Quality-of-Service). In this paper, we propose an exclusive memory scheduling policy by the observation of memory locality and latency tolerance of multimedia modules. We build a window mechanism and make IP cores monopolize the memory bus round-robin to get both performance and fairness. The experiment results show that the proposed scheduling policy improves the system bandwidth by 36.5% and reduces CPU latency by 29% under heaviest workload compared to a QoS-based control policy. In addition, our policy has low hardware cost and can cooperate with other schedulers.