On hybrid memory allocation for FPGA behavioral synthesis (abstract only)

FPGA behavioral synthesis has gained significant momentum recently with the growing interests in accelerating high-performance computing applications. While the latest generation of high-level synthesis (HLS) tools has made significant progress, they still lack the support for certain high-level language features such as dynamic memory allocation, despite the fact that efficiently utilization of the on-chip memory resources in FPGAs is critical to achieve the performance and power consumption target for many designs. To tackle the above problem, in this paper, we propose a novel hybrid memory allocation scheme to map malloc/free in C programing language onto FPGA platforms. By estimating the memory usage and available FPGA memory resources, the scheme judiciously allocates static memory blocks and/or instantiate hardware allocators for memory requests. And the partition between these two parts is based on estimated access counts and solving an ILP to minimize overhead from dynamic memory allocation. Experimental results on benchmark circuits demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique.