Types and Design Styles—Microprocessors and microcomputers

This paper describes the first steps towards a Java multiprocessor system on a single chip for embedded systems. The chip multiprocessing (CMP) system consists of a homogeneous set of processing elements and a shared memory. Each processor core is based on the Java Optimized Processor (JOP). A major challenge in CMP is the shared memory access of multiple CPUs. The proposed memory arbiter resolves possible emerging conflicts of parallel accesses to the shared memory using a fixed priority scheme. Furthermore, the paper describes the boot-up of the CMP. We verify the proposed CMP architecture by the implementation of the prototype called JopCMP. JopCMP consists of multiple JOPs and a shared memory. Finally yet importantly, the first implementation of the CMP composed of two/three JOPs in an FPGA enables us to present a comparison of the performance between a single-core JOP and the CMP version by running real applications