BANK SHARING AND REFRESH IN A SHARED MULTI-PORT MEMORY DEVICE

摘要

A method and system for sharing banks (110) of memory in a multi-port (120) memory device (100) between components is provided. The multi-port memory device includes multiple ports to which components of a system are attached, and multiple banks of memory within the multi-port memory device that are shared by each of the ports. A bank availability pin is added to each port for each bank of memory. The bank availability pin is signaled when the bank is available to a particular port and unsignaled when the bank is unavailable. Thus, the multi-port memory device can be shared by several components simultaneously with only a small amount of additional hardware to support the sharing. Also provided are methods for refreshing the banks of memory.