Hardware Compilation of Application-Specific Memory Access Interconnect

A major obstacle to successful high-level synthesis (HLS) of large-scale application-specified integrated circuit systems is the presence of memory accesses to a shared-memory subsystem. The latency to access memory is often not statically predictable, which creates problems for scheduling operations dependent on memory reads. More fundamental is that depen-dences between accesses may not be statically provable (e.g., if the specification language permits pointers), which introduces memory-consistency problems. Addressing these issues with static scheduling results in overly conservative circuits, and thus, most state-of-the-art HLS tools limit memory systems to those that have predictable latencies and limit programmers to specifications that forbid arbitrary memory-reference patterns. A new HLS framework for the synthesis and optimization of memory accesses (SOMA) is presented. SOMA enables specifications t