Palmchip Corporation

Robin Bhagat

Lyle E Adams

Michael Ou

Hussam I Ramlaoui

Billy D Mills

S Jauher A Zaidi

The System-on-Chip apparatus and integration methodology disclosed includes a single semiconductor integrated circuit having one or more processor subsystems, one or more DMA-type peripherals, and a Memory Access Controller (MAC) on a first internal unidirectional bus. The first internal unidirectional bus controls transactions between the processor subsystem(s) and the DMA peripheral(s) using a Memory Access Controller (MAC) and unidirectional, positive-edge clocked address and transaction control signals. The first internal unidirectional bus can support burst operation, variable-speed pipelined memory transactions, and hidden arbitration. The SoC may include a second internal unidirectional bus that controls transactions between the processor subsystem(s) and non-DMA peripherals. The second internal unidirectional bus controls transactions between the processor subsystem(s) and the non-DMA peripheral(s) using unidirectional address and transaction control signals. Peripherals may be synchronous or asynchronous to their respective buses.

Unidirectional bus architecture for SoC applications

A interrupt controller includes specialized interfaces and controls for ARM7TDMI-type microcontroller cores. Such sends interrupt vectors and IRQ or FIQ interrupt requests to the processor depending on particular interrupts received. Wherein, THUMB program execution is more economical with program code space, and an interrupt service routine preamble is coded in ARM program code to cause a switch to THUMB program execution. The interrupt service routine preamble is shared amongst all the interrupt service routines to further economize on program code space.

Integrated circuit including interrupt controller with shared preamble execution and global-disable control bit

A system-on-chip interconnection structure and method uses unidirectional buses only, central shared memory controllers, separate interconnects for high-speed and low-speed peripherals, zero wait-state register accesses, application-specific memory map and peripherals, application-specific test methodology, allowances for cache controllers, and good fits with standard ASIC flow and tools.

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Robin Bhagat