System-on-a-chip architectures (very suitable for embedded real-time applications) require careful attention to the management of on-chip memory. Static allocation is inefficient, while dynamic allocation is not deterministic, which makes satisfaction of real-time constraints difficult, if not impossible.

The authors of this paper propose a novel approach that allows fast and deterministic dynamic allocation/de-allocation of large global on-chip memory. The approach focuses on implementing a special hardware memory management unit. The paper demonstrates how a real-time operating system might be modified to support this special hardware unit.

Section 1 of the paper is introductory. Section 2 presents an overview of related work done to implement the memory management in hardware. Section 3 briefly describes the architecture of the memory management unit. There are three types of commands that the unit can execute: allocate (exclusive, read only, read write), de-allocate, and move. Section 4 presents the real-time operating system support for the memory management unit. The authors have extended Atalanta [1], an open-source, real-time operating system developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology, to add the required new functionality. Section 5 presents some experimental results, and section 6 concludes the paper.