Constructing application-specific memory hierarchies on FPGAs

  • Authors:
  • Harald Devos;Jan Van Campenhout;Ingrid Verbauwhede;Dirk Stroobandt

  • Affiliations:
  • Parallel Information Systems, ELIS-Dept., Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Parallel Information Systems, ELIS-Dept., Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, ESAT, Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium;Parallel Information Systems, ELIS-Dept., Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Transactions on high-performance embedded architectures and compilers III
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The high performance potential of an FPGA is not fully exploited if a design suffers a memory bottleneck. Therefore, a memory hierarchy is needed to reuse data in on-chip buffer memories and minimize the number of accesses to off-chip memory. Buffer memories not only hide the external memory latency, but can also be used to remap data and augment the on-chip bandwidth through parallel access of multiple buffers. This paper discusses the differences and similarities of memory hierarchies on processor- and on FPGA-based systems and presents a step-by-step methodology to construct a memory hierarchy on an FPGA.