# Increasing FPGA Accelerators Memory Bandwidth with a Burst-Friendly Memory Layout

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Accelerator-driven Data Arrangement to Minimize Transformers Run-time on Multi-core Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13000/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Offloading compute-intensive kernels to hardware accelerators relies on the large degree of parallelism offered by these platforms. However, the effective bandwidth of the memory interface often causes a bottleneck, hindering the accelerator's effective performance. Techniques enabling data reuse, such as tiling, lower the pressure on memory traffic but still often leave the accelerators I/O-bound. A further increase in effective bandwidth is possible by using burst rather than element-wise accesses, provided the data is contiguous in memory. In this paper, we propose a memory allocation technique, and provide a proof-of-concept source-to-source compiler pass, that enables such burst transfers by modifying the data layout in external memory. We assess how this technique pushes up the memory throughput, leaving room for exploiting additional parallelism, for a minimal logic overhead.