ConGen: An Application Specific DRAM Memory Controller Generator

The increasing gap between the bandwidth requirements of modern Systems on Chip (SoC) and the I/O data rate delivered by Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), known as the Memory Wall, limits the performance of today's data-intensive applications. General purpose memory controllers use online scheduling techniques in order to increase the memory bandwidth. Due to a limited buffer depth they only have a local view on the executed application. However, numerous applications possess regular or fixed memory access patterns, which are not yet exploited to overcome the memory wall. In this paper, we present a holistic methodology to generate an Application Specific Memory Controller (ASMC), which has a global view on the application and utilizes application knowledge to decrease the energy and increase the bandwidth. To generate an ASMC we analyze the DRAM access pattern of the application offline and generate a custom address mapping by solving a combinatorial sequence partitioning problem.

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