A simple alternative for storage allocation in high-level synthesis

A recent trend in high-level synthesis is to introduce special structure memory elements as an alternative to RAMs which suffer from address generation and decoding overhead. In this paper, an alternative, called sequential FIFO memory (SFM) is investigated. The problem of allocating variables to SFMs is studied thoroughly including the theoretical background, mapping algorithms and experiments. Moreover, the combinatorial optimization problems related to SFMs were found to be tractable in contrast to those of previous non-RAM alternatives.