Memory Controllers Part 1 of 2

By Michael Miller

Chief Technology Officer

MoSys, Inc.

Overview

With so many solutions out on the market today, it makes sense to take a deeper dive into memory solutions and what they can offer. The MoSys memory controllers are designed to simplify the integration of the accelerator engines into a design. The controllers are built with all the high-speed SerDes control and implementation of the GCI protocol essentially “hidden away” from your design effort. MoSys controllers which have been deployed in the field since 2004 have been proven to be robust and reliable.

The interface, which is presented to the user application interface is a straightforward Address, Data, Command bus structure, that is compatible with and easily adapted to an AXI interface. Multiple versions are available to support different access patterns and for different hosts (Xilinx, Intel, ASIC etc.)

The MoSys memory controllers are designed and offered with a few variations of memory access patterns. The most common access patterns are:

The RTL that is supplied by MoSys provides an interface between the User Application Logic and the MoSys Accelerator Engine device (could be BE-2 or BE-3 families). The Memory Controller also implements all the required signaling and handshaking defined in the GCI Interface protocol, Framer logic.

The signals interface at the User Application provides Bandwidth Engine User a simple SRAM memory read/write operation with burst capability. This simple interface shields the users from the BE-X commands and the scheduling logic for Bandwidth Engine memory partitions wheel.

The goal of each of the Memory Controller designs is to balance the bandwidth between the User Application Interface and the Bandwidth Engine Interface. For many applications there will be four read/write interfaces from the User Application running at the host core clock frequency. This is to balance the bandwidth of the application logic (assumed to be running at FPGA speeds vs. the GCI I/O and core frequency of the MoSys accelerator engines). In many of the FPGA applications that has been between 250MHz and 390MHz clock rate. Each interface can accommodate one memory read and one memory write on each clock cycle. These result in memory accesses per interface that can saturate the access bus to the memory.

This allows the total bandwidth at the User Application interfaces to be up to 2 billion memory accesses per second when using a BE-2 device and 6 billion memory operations when using a BE-3 device. (This bandwidth matches the total I/O bandwidth on Bandwidth Engine when using all 16 lanes at maximum allowable SerDes rate of the Accelerator engine device) per lane. The following picture illustrates the above memory bandwidth discussion.

Additional Resources:

BLAZAR Family Overview

RLT B2-B3 Memory Controller Product Brief

RTL Controller Overview

Part 1 of this blog focused on an overview of MoSys memory controllers. Part 2 will delve into the micro architecture of MoSys memory controllers and statistics of R-M-W. If you are looking for more technical information or need to discuss your technical challenges with an expert, we are happy to help. Email us and we will arrange to have one of our technical specialists speak with you.  You can also sign up for updates. Finally, please follow us on social media so we can keep in touch.