A SoC Booting Acceleration Strategy Based on Self-Migration Technology

The SoC booting is performed as the first step after system power-on and its rate is significantly affected by the boot medium interface rate. This paper reported an acceleration strategy based on self-migration technology. By redirecting boot image itself from a low-speed NOR flash device to a high-speed RAM device, a higher booting speed was achieved. The modified data format of the boot image was designed and two kinds of boot processes of the bare metal and bootloader were proposed. A SoC verification platform based on a dual-core ARM CPU and various interface modules was set up. By compiling different interface functions, the boot time was all decreased significantly in different boot image size. This result proved the code self-migration was a promising candidate in the SoC booting.