MEMORY SUBSYSTEMS

 

As SoC complexity grows, a major design challenge is achieving highly sustainable bandwidth when accessing shared memory. MemMax® RD™ provides a “plug and play” solution for use with the Synopsys DesignWare DDR2 Protocol Controller that enables rapid construction of a high performance SoC external DDR2 memory subsystem.

Pre-verified interface logic and configuration settings for both MemMax RD and the DDR2 Protocol Controller are included as part of the MemMax RD solution. These additions are specifically engineered to operate the DDR2 Protocol Controller at its optimal performance, providing an out of the box alternative to spending extensive engineering time and effort assembling and optimizing similar components.

When used in conjunction with Sonics SMART Interconnect™ solutions, MemMax RD provides a highly optimized processor to memory pins SoC architecture that meets even the most demanding communications and streaming bandwidth intensive applications, such as high definition TV or new set top boxes.

Using MemMax RD improves DRAM utilization by providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to heterogeneous processing elements, lowering the risk of starving processing elements such as DSPs, H.264 devices, and graphics processors.

MemMax RD manages and schedules multi-threaded pipelined accesses to DRAM to improve memory utilization and effective bandwidth. SoC designers can use compiled RAM to consolidate all of the flip-flop based buffers normally distributed among the various initiator cores into a single buffer within MemMax RD. This reduces total SoC die area and lowers overall power consumption.