Distributed memory architecture for high-level synthesis of embedded controllers from Erlang

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed memory architecture for dedicated hardware automatically synthesized from Erlang programs. Our team had developed a framework for generating embedded systems controllers whose behavior was specified by a subset of Erlang, where each process was mapped into hardware (a logic circuit) running independently of the circuits for the other processes. However, the resulting hardware was not of practical use because it shared a single main memory potentially accessed by all the circuits for the processes simultaneously. To address this issue, in this paper, the main memory is partitioned into banks so that each process can access its own memory independently of the other processes. In order to keep the interconnections for message passing to a practical size, a bus architecture is employed where send requests are arbitrated by an arbiter (logic circuit). In order to make the resulting hardware as small as possible, a garbage collection circuit is shared among the circuits for the processes also under the control of the arbiter. From a simple Erlang specification, Verilog HDL codes for necessary hardware to construct a system has been generated.