Hardware compilation of application-specific memory-access interconnect

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems 2006-05, Vol.25 (5), p.756-771
• Main Authors: Venkataramani, G., Bjerregaard, T., Chelcea, T., Goldstein, S.C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Application specific integrated circuits; Communication synthesis; Construction; dataflow synthesis; Delay; Design engineering; Dynamic scheduling; Dynamics; Hardware; High level synthesis; high-level synthesis (HLS); Integrated circuit interconnections; Integrated circuit synthesis; interface design; Large scale integration; Optimization; Order disorder; Programming profession; Scheduling; Specification languages; Specifications; Studies; Synthesis
• ISSN: 0278-0070; 1937-4151
• DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2006.870411

A major obstacle to successful high-level synthesis (HLS) of large-scale application-specified integrated circuit systems is the presence of memory accesses to a shared-memory subsystem. The latency to access memory is often not statically predictable, which creates problems for scheduling operations dependent on memory reads. More fundamental is that dependences between accesses may not be statically provable (e.g., if the specification language permits pointers), which introduces memory-consistency problems. Addressing these issues with static scheduling results in overly conservative circuits, and thus, most state-of-the-art HLS tools limit memory systems to those that have predictable latencies and limit programmers to specifications that forbid arbitrary memory-reference patterns. A new HLS framework for the synthesis and optimization of memory accesses (SOMA) is presented. SOMA enables specifications to include arbitrary memory references (e.g., pointers) and allows the memory system to incorporate features that might cause the latency of a memory access to vary dynamically. This results in raising the level of abstraction in the input specification, enabling faster design times. SOMA synthesizes a memory access network (MAN) architecture that facilitates dynamic scheduling and ordering of memory accesses. The paper describes a basic MAN construction technique that illustrates how dynamic ordering helps in efficiently maintaining memory consistency and how dynamic scheduling helps alleviate the variable-latency problem. Then, it is shown how static analysis of the access patterns can be used to optimize the MAN. One optimization changes the MAN interconnect topology to increase concurrence. A second optimization reduces the synchronization overhead necessary to maintain memory consistency. Postlayout experiments demonstrate that SOMA's application-specific MAN construction significantly improves power and performance for a range of benchmarks.