Direct Memory Access (DMA) is one of several methods for coordinating the timing of data transfers between an input/output (I/O) device and the core processing unit or memory in a computer. DMA is one of the faster types of synchronization mechanisms, generally providing significant improvement over interrupts, in terms of both latency and throughput.
An I/O device often operates at a much slower speed than the core. DMA allows the I/O device to access the memory directly, without using the core. DMA can lead to a signifi-cant improvement in performance because data movement is one of the most common operations performed in processing applications. There are several advantages of using DMA, rather than the one in which core does a memory to transfer operation and vice versa and this paper discuss all these advantages with various applications of DMA Controller.
DMA is used in almost every complex system or subsystems , but its observed that teams either build the DMA controller from scratch for each project for specific application or take the existing DMAC available from elsewhere.
Here in this article I have tried to discuss the architecture of DMAC that can be used with any kind of Bus, configuration (parallel, serial transfers), can be connected to any kind of ports, most importantly any kind of software assumptions can be implemented in the DMAC very easily. I call it Universal DMA Controller.
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