A Non-Cacheable Address Designating Scheme in MMU-less Embedded Microprocessor Systems

This paper proposes a novel scheme of designating non-cacheable addresses of memories in embedded systems of multi-master architectures without a Memory Management Unit (MMU). As a solution for data coherency problem between external memories and a cache memory, we proposes a cache masking scheme by allocating the most significant bit of address not used in 32-bit address system as indicator bit to designate non-cacheable address. As this scheme enables non-cacheable area designation every address, the simpler in the aspect of hardware and more flexible size of non-cacheable area can be obtained.