SOMA A Tool for Synthesizing and Optimizing Memory Accesses in ASICs |
Girish Venkataramani, Tobias Bjerregaard, Tiberiu Chelcea, Seth Copen Goldstein
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| Abstract | Arbitrary memory dependencies and variable latency memory systems are major obstacles to the synthesis of large-scale ASIC systems in high-level synthesis. This paper presents SOMA, a synthesis framework for constructing Memory Access Network (MAN) architectures that inherently enforce memory consistency in the presence of dynamic memory access dependencies. A fundamental bottleneck in any such network is arbitrating between concurrent
accesses to a shared memory resource. To alleviate this bottleneck, SOMA uses an application-specific concurrency analysis technique to predict the dynamic memory parallelism profile of the application. This is then used to customize the MAN architecture. Depending on the parallelism profile, the MAN may be optimized for latency, throughput or both. The optimized MAN
is automatically synthesized into gate-level structural Verilog using a flexible library of network building blocks. SOMA has been successfully integrated into an automated C-to-hardware synthesis flow, which generates standard cell circuits from unrestricted ANSI-C programs. Post-layout experiments demonstrate that application specific MAN construction significantly improves power and performance. |
| Keywords | clockless, asynchronous, synthesis, ansi-c, memory access, network-on-chip |
| Type | Conference paper [With referee] |
| Conference | Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware-Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS'05) |
| Year | 2005 Month September pp. 231-236 |
| Publisher | ACM |
| Electronic version(s) | [pdf] |
| BibTeX data | [bibtex] |
| IMM Group(s) | Computer Science & Engineering |