Martijn Johan Rutten

Resource Reservations in Shared-Memory Multiprocessor SoCs

Consumer electronics vendors increasingly deploy shared-memory multiprocessor Systems on Chip (SoC), such as Philips Nexperia, to balance flexibility (late changes, software download, reuse) and cost (silicon area, power consumption) requirements. With the convergence of storage, digital television, and connectivity, these media-processing systems must support numerous operational modes. Within a mode, the system concurrently processes many streams, each imposing a potentially dynamic workload on the scarce system resources. The dynamic sharing of scarce resources is known to jeopardize robustness and predictability. Resource reservation is an accepted approach to tackle this problem. This chapter applies the resource reservation paradigm to interrelated SoC resources: processor cycles, cache space, and memory access cycles. The presented virtual platform approach aims to integrate the reservation mechanisms of each shared SoC resource as the first step towards robust, yet flexible and cost-effective consumer products.