A scalable high-performance DMA architecture for DSP applications

As frequency and processing capabilities of today's Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are increasing, so is the needed data rate to fully utilize the available processing bandwidth. Moreover, high-end applications may require multiple DSP's on a single chip, further pushing the data rate requirements. There are varying external devices with which the processors may wish to communicate concurrently. A 'plug and play' like approach for external devices and a scalable high-performance multi-processor data rate solution would be highly desirable. In this paper, a scalable, high performance Direct Memory Access (DMA) architecture for all on-chip and off-chip data communication between multiple processors and various external devices is proposed. This architecture has been implemented on Texas Instruments TMS320C6211 C6x DSP.