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 Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. Such SoC designs typically have more than one processor and huge memory, all on the same chip. Dealing with the global onchip memory allocation/de-allocation in a dynamic yet deterministic way is an important issue for the 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 paradigm shift in the way designers look at on-chip dynamic memory allocation -- we present a 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 operating system management of memory allocated to a particular on-chip Processing Element). 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 (for an example of a four processing element SoC, the dynamic memory allocation of the global onchip memory takes sixteen cycles per allocation/deallocation in the worst case). In this paper, we show how to modify an existing Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) to support the new proposed SoCDMMU. Our example shows a multiprocessor SoC that utilizes the SoCDMMU has 440% overall speedup of the application transition time over fully shared memory that does not utilize the SoCDMMU.

As the number of transistors on a single chip increases rapidly, there is a productivity gap between the increasing number of available transistors and the design time. One solution to reduce this productivity gap is to increase the use of Intellectual Property (IP) cores. However, an IP core should be customized/configured before being used in a system different than the one for which it was designed. Thus, to reconfigure the IP core, either an engineer must spend significant effort altering the core by hand or else an enhanced CAD tool (IP generator) can automatically configure and customize the core according to the customer specifications.