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Core File: Accessing External Memory on TI TMS320C54x
Summary: Large amounts of data can be stored in external memory. The READPROG and WRITPROG macros copy data between internal memory and external memory.
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Introduction
The TI DSP evaluation boards you use have a large amount of memory; in addition to the 32K words internal to the DSP, there are another 256K words of memory installed on the EVM board. For many exercises, the data sets are small, and you worked with only the on-chip memory of the DSP and were not expected to consider how the use of memory impacted performance. However, the large delays often required in audio processing, for example, require that many thousands of samples be stored in memory. There is not enough memory on the DSP microprocessor itself to store a second or more of samples at a 44.1 kHz sample rate, so the off-chip memory must be used.
EVM Memory Maps
As you have seen, the TI TMS320C54x DSP has two separate
memory spaces, called Program and Data. Usually, Program
contains your assembled program, and Data contains data, but
sometimes it may be convenient or more efficient to violate
this convention. (For instance, the firs
instruction requires filter coefficients in the Program
address space.) The Data space is 64K long and is accessed
using the 16-bit auxiliary registers
(ARx). Although the Program space is normally
accessed using 16-bit literals stored in your program code,
the Program space is, in fact, significantly larger than 64K.
Using special "extended addressing" instructions, the TI DSP
can access up to 8192K-words of memory in the Program space.
The extended addressing instructions include far calls and
jumps that reset the full 23-bit program counter, as well as
accumulator-addressed data-transfer instructions.
Internal and external memory
In many exercises, it is possible to store program instructions and data entirely in the DSP's on-chip ("internal") memory. This internal memory has several advantages over off-chip ("external") memory: it is much faster (data stored can be accessed without delay), and multiple reads and writes can access the DSP's on-chip memory simultaneously. However, many applications (including the audio delay effect of Using External Memory) require a data buffer too large to fit into the on-chip memory. For these large buffers, we must use the larger but slower external memory.
When writing programs that require large amounts of memory, use the internal memory to hold your code, filter coefficients, and any small buffers you need. External memory should be used for large buffers that you only access a few times per sample, like the delay buffer described in Audio Effects: Using External Memory.
TMS320C549x DSP EVM memory maps
 |
As these memory maps show, the EVM's Data address space is
addressed fully by the 16-bit auxiliary registers
(ARx) and address-extension words and the
mapping of Data memory is not affected by the
OVLY bit. However, because the Program memory
space is much larger than can be addressed by the 16-bit
addressing register or the 16-bit literals stored in the
program, it is split up into 64K (16-bit) pages by the
hardware. Normal instructions, such as call,
firs, and mvpd accept only 16-bit
addresses, and can therefore only address the current "page"
(usually address in the form 00xxxxh, which
corresponds to the addresses the linker uses for your
program's code). To access the full 23-bit address space,
the DSP offers special accumulator-addressed load, store,
and jump instructions.
Further complicating matters is the fact that the
OVLY bit affects the mapping of the Program
memory space. If you remember, before we load our DSP
program, we have to change the PMST to
FFE0h. We do this to set the OVLY
bit in the PMST, which maps the internal memory
into both the Program and Data spaces of the DSP. If
OVLY is 1, the internal memory appears in both
the Data and Program memory address space at locations
0080h to 07FFFh. Therefore, with
OVLY set, anything written into Data memory
below 07FFFh will overwrite a program stored in
the same location. 1 In addition, copies of the internal memory
also appear in the extended Program address space, occupying
locations 0080h-7FFFh of each
page. Therefore, with OVLY set, any addresses
to Program memory locations in the form of
xx0000h-xx7FFFh reference internal
memory.
When OVLY is zero, internal memory is not
mapped into the Program space at all; in this case, the
Program space includes only external memory. In this mode,
all 192K words of external Program RAM are accessible,
although several wait states will be required for accessing
each item of memory. In the overlay mode, only addresses in
the ranges of 08000h-0FF00h,
1800h-1FFFFh, and
28000h-2FFFFh are available to
store your data buffers; the remaining addresses are
unmapped or map to the on-chip RAM.
To escape this confusion and allow the full 192K-words of
external Program RAM to be used for your data buffers, the
core file provides mechanisms for manipulating the
PMST indirectly. Instead of accessing the
external Program RAM directly, we can use the special macros
to access the RAM that is normally "hidden" by the internal
memory. This allows us to use the full range of external
memory available: addresses
000000h-00FF00h and
010000h-02FFFF. However, since
addresses 00FF00h-00FFFFh are
reserved by the core file, you must be careful not to write
to addresses in this range.
Accessing Extended Program RAM
The core file provides two macros for accessing data stored in
the external Program RAM: READPROG and
WRITPROG. These macros allow the processor to
copy data between data memory and external Program
memory. Both macros address external Program memory using the
value in accumulator A. READPROG
reads data from the external Program memory location pointed
to by A and writes it to the data memory location pointed to
by AR1. WRITPROG reads data from the
memory location pointed to by AR1 and writes it
to the location in external Program RAM specified by
accumulator A. Both macros take one parameter, a
count; specifying 1 reads or writes one word from external
memory, and specifying some other number
A and AR1. AR1 is left
pointing at the word after the last word read or written; no
other registers are modified.
For instance, the following code fragment loads the value
contained in memory location 023456h into the
location 0064h in data memory using the
READPROG macro:
1 stm #64h,AR1 ; load 64h into AR1
2 ld #02h,16,A ; load 02h in high part of A
3 adds #3456h,A ; fill in low part of A
4 ; A contains 023456h
5 READPROG 1 ; read from 023456h in external Program RAM
6 ; into *AR1 in Data RAM
The WRITPROG macro can be used similarly to write
into extended Program RAM:
1 stm #64h,AR1 ; load 64h into AR1
2 ld #02h,16,A ; load 02h in high part of A
3 adds #3456h,A ; fill in low part of A
4 ; A contains 023456h
5 WRITPROG 1 ; write from *AR1 in Data RAM to
6 ; 023456h in external Program RAM
Note that Code Composer will not display or allow you to
change the contents of the external Program RAM on the
memory-dump or disassembly screen, though you can view or
change it indirectly by watching the effects of the
READPROG and WRITPROG macros on data
memory.
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This work is licensed by Douglas L. Jones, Swaroop Appadwedula, Matthew Berry, Mark Haun, Jake Janovetz, Michael Kramer, Dima Moussa, Daniel Sachs, and Brian Wade under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 1.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Adan Galvan on Feb 25, 2004 11:52 am US/Central.
"Doug course at UIUC using the TI C54x DSP has been adopted by many EE, CE and CS depts Worldwide "