Multi-Bank Memory Aware Force Directed Scheduling for High-Level Synthesis

Abstract

High-level synthesis has been widely recognized and accepted as an efficient compilation process targeting field-programmable gate arrays for algorithm evaluation and product prototyping. However, the massively parallel memory access demands and the extremely expensive cost of single-bank memory with multi-port have impeded loop pipelining performance. Thus, based on an alternative multi-bank memory architecture, a joint approach that employs memory-aware force directed scheduling and multi-cycle memory partitioning is formally proposed to achieve legitimate pipelining kernel and valid bank mapping with less resource consumption and optimal pipelining performance. The experimental results over a variety of benchmarks show that our approach can achieve the optimal pipelining performance and meanwhile reduce the number of multiple independent memory banks by 49.2% on average, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.