A Resolution for Shared Memory Conflict in Multiprocessor System-on-a-Chip

Abstract: Now days, manufacturers are focusing on increasing the concurrency in multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) architecture instead of increasing clock speed, for embedded systems. Traditionally lock-based synchronization is provided to support concurrency; as managing locks can be very difficult and error prone. Transactional memories and lock based systems have been extensively used to provide synchronization between multiple processors [1] in general-purpose systems. It has been shown that locks have numerous shortcomings over transactional memory in terms of power consumption, ease of programming and performance. In this paper, we propose a new semaphore scheme for synchronization in shared cache memory in an MPSoC. Moreover, we have evaluated and compared our scheme with locks and transactions in terms of energy consumption and cache miss rate using SimpleScalar functional simulator.