MEMORY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OFFERING DIRECT AS WELL AS MANAGED ACCESS TO LOCAL STORAGE MEMORY

摘要

An Accelerated Storage Controller (ASC) (18) in an electronic device (10) allows both conventional (slower) application processor (12) to memory interfaces (14) to be employed transparently to existing software, while also allowing software configuration to realize an accelerated storage architecture on demand. Some use cases for the electronic device (10) do not require accelerated storage, and a bypass mode does not require any modification to existing software. Other use cases (such as fast download of multiple gigabytes of media) benefit from an accelerated storage architecture offloading transfer from the electronic device application processor (12), but could also work with the traditional processor (12) to memory interface (14), at the cost of slower downloads. Embodiments of the present invention provide for both these possibilities in a software-configurable architecture. Furthermore, a number of other connectivity options are provided under software control to optimize performance and connectivity for different use case scenarios.