Design and Implementation of a Schedulable DMAC on an AMBA-Based SOPC Platform

A traditional DMA scheme hardly guarantees I/O throughput for real time multimedia applications. In this paper, we propose a novel SDMA (schedulable DMA) mechanism that guarantees real time I/O throughput and interrupts the CPU as few as possible. Furthermore, it can accept unscheduled requests and provide facility to treat unexpected delay to access I/O or memory. The controller handling the SDMA was successfully implemented on an AMBA-based SOPC platform. Experimental result shows that the SDMA has better performance than a traditional DMA