Window memory accesses method in alternate row/column matrix access systems

Many systems, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing, two-dimensional image processing, 2d-FFT calculation, need access the row and column data of their matrix alternately. The DRAM memory should be used due to huge data in these systems. To improve the usage of memory bandwidth in such systems, this paper theoretically analyses the optimal window size to minimize the total number of opening/closing pages when performing in such instances by balancing the number of handling physical pages between row and column accesses. This paper presents a window-based optimal memory access method, and we implemented an FPGA-based SDRAM controller with eight simple ports, which is based on window accessing mechanism and supports commercialized SDARM. The experimental results show that the effective I/O bandwidth of external SDRAM using our window layout approach increases from 114.2MB/s of naive implementation to 730.2MB/s with over 6X speedup. In addition, we implemented two SAR processing systems with four FFT processing elements using our window-based SDRAM controller and Corner Turn method separately in FPGA chip. Results show window-based method can achieve a speedup of 2.6 compared to Corner Turn method.