Area implications of memory partitioning for high-level synthesis on FPGAs

FPGAs normally have numerous independent memory banks that can be accessed simultaneously, potentially offering a very large memory bandwidth. Adopting a suitable application-based memory partitioning strategy is thus vital to take full advantage of the memory architecture. In addition to improving the potential memory bandwidth, partitioning also affects the area complexity of the generated system because the required steering logic depends on the partitioning scheme. This work describes the area implications of a lattice-based memory partitioning technique in the context of high-level synthesis for FPGAs. Experimental results with a commercial HLS tool show that the proposed partitioning technique improves area efficiency compared to alternative approaches.