An Evaluation of Burst Transfer Inferred by a High-level Synthesis Tool

Abstract

High-level synthesis, HLS, is the technology that automatically converts software to hardware. The HLS has been paid attention as the promising technology which can reduce the burden of hardware development. However, if software program converted by HLS don’t consider organization of hardware, the current HLS technology can’t convert software to proper hardware. One of the characteristics of the hardware to be considered is burst transfer to memory access. Burst transfer attempts to speed up memory access by packing continuous data to a single address. This paper shows the case study of drawing quadrangle, which demonstrates how to describe a C software program so that HLS tool can infer burst transfer with arbitrary burst length. Moreover, we consider the necessity to suppress optimization performed by HLS tool to prevent increase the amount of hardware when we carry out the arbitrary burst length. Experiments clarify how the performance and the hardware scale change by the difference of the burst length and suppression of optimization.