A bandwidth optimized SDRAM controller for the MORPHEUS reconfigurable architecture

High-end applications designed for the MORPHEUS computing platform require a massive amount of memory and memory throughput to fully demonstrate MORPHEUS's potential as a high-performance reconfigurable architecture. For example, a proposed film grain noise reduction application for high definition video, which is composed of multiple image processing tasks, requires enormous data rates due to its large input image size and real-time processing constraints. To meet these requirements and to eliminate external memory bottlenecks, a bandwidth- optimized DDR-SDRAM memory controller has been designed for use with the MORPHEUS platform and its Network On Chip interconnect. This paper describes the controller's design requirements and architecture, including the interface to the Network On Chip and the two-stage memory access scheduler, and presents relevant experiments and performance figures.