SHARED RESOURCE ARCHITECTURE FOR MULTICHANNEL PROCESSING SYSTEM

摘要

A signal processing system employs a shared resource architecture, sharing processor, memory and I/O resources to process cannelized data efficiently, with low power and a competitive cost per channel. The architecture employs a shared data memory between a plurality of processing engines, such that tasks may be reallocated among the processors based on capacity, or tasks may be worked on in parallel. The processing engines share a program memory that is independent of the data memory, which contains a single instance of all of the code required to process the incoming data. The program memory is only accessed on instruction cache misses in the engines. Both memories are shared over pipelined and arbitrated crossbar switches that service that service the requestors. The memories are broken into independent banks of memory so that multiple accesses may be serviced in parallel, except where there is contention. I/O is also shared among the engines, as the channelized data is routed to the appropriate assigned engines, and processed data is collected from the data memory. Supervisory processes also share the program memory and the data memory with the processing engines. The supervisory processors monitor the processing of the data, allocate the processing resources, and monitor the I/O process. The processing engines and their shared data memory may be duplicated as clusters, where the engines for each cluster share the cluster data memory with only those engines in the cluster, but share the program memory and I/O with all of the engines of all of the clusters. Interlocks are employed at the cluster level and at the system level to permit sharing of global and cluster resources in an orderly fashion. The architecture has particular application to voice-over packet (VOP) applications.