Don't Forget the Memory: Automatic Block RAM Modelling, Optimization, and Architecture Exploration

Abstract

While academic FPGA architecture exploration tools have become sufficiently advanced to enable a wide variety of explorations and optimizations on soft fabric and outing, support for Block RAM (BRAM) has been very limited. In this paper, we present enhancements to the COFFE transistor sizing tool to facilitate automatic generation and optimization of BRAM for both SRAM and Magnetic Tunnelling Junction technologies. These new capabilities enable investigation of area, delay, and energy trends for various sizes of BRAM or different BRAM technologies. We also validate these trends against available commercial FPGA BRAM data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that BRAMs generated by COFFE can be used to carry out system-level architecture explorations using an area-oriented RAM-mapping flow and the Verilog-To-Routing flow.