Automatic FPGA synthesis of memory intensive C-based kernels

Abstract

Realising high performance image and signal processing applications on modern FPGA presents a challenging implementation problem due to the large data frames streaming through these systems. Specifically, to meet the high bandwidth and data storage demands of these applications, complex hierarchical memory architectures must be manually specified at the Register Transfer Level (RTL). Automated approaches which convert high-level operation descriptions, for instance in the form of C programs, to an FPGA architecture, are unable to automatically realise such architectures. This paper presents a solution to this problem. It presents a compiler to automatically derive such memory architectures from a C program. By transforming the input C program to a unique dataflow modelling dialect, known as Valved Dataflow (VDF), a mapping and synthesis approach developed for this dialect can be exploited to automatically create high performance image and video processing architectures. Memory intensive C kernels for Motion Estimation (CIF Frames at 30 fps), Matrix Multiplication (128×128 @ 500 iter/sec) and Sobel Edge Detection (720p @ 30 fps), which are unrealisable by current state-of-the-art C-based synthesis tools, are automatically derived from a C description of the algorithm.