High-Performance and Resource-Efficient Dynamic Memory Management in High-Level Synthesis

With the merits of high productivity and ease of use, highlevel synthesis (HLS) tools bring hope to fast FPGA-based architecture development. However, their usability and popularity are still limited due to lack of support for dynamic memory management (DMM). Though HLS-compatible DMM solutions have been proposed recently, nevertheless, based on our investigation, none of them can hit high performance (i.e., minimal memory (de-)allocation latency) and resource efficiency (i.e., managing arbitrarily sized memory with minimal FPGA resource consumption) with one stone, seriously limiting their practicality. In response, we propose HeroDMM, a high-performance and resource-efficient dynamic memory manager for HLS. Specifically, HeroDMM organizes the managed memory area with a novel cartesian-like tree (CT) structure, a key to resolving the dilemma between (de-)allocation latency and resource efficiency standing in front of prior efforts. With the CT structure, HeroDMM further devises a delicate memory management algorithm and specializes the hardware implementation for achieving ever-higher performance while ensuring resource efficiency. Results show that HeroDMM outperforms state-of-the-art HLS-compatible DMM solutions by 61.69% 99.99% in performance improvement and 23.79% 97.22% in resource consumption savings.