Meltrix: A RRAM-Based Polymorphic Architecture Enhanced by Function Synthesis

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are popular for computational intensive applications and hardware accelerators recently. But they face limitations in memory capacity and its growth, resulting in excessive time spent on data access. The fixed capacity of embedded memory blocks also leads inflexibility and resource waste. Moreover, logic blocks in FPGAs which are insufficient for large-scale applications and fixed memory block positions both lead to high routing overhead. To address these issues, we propose a software-hardware co-designed polymorphic architecture called Meltrix. The hardware architecture, which uses RRAM arrays as the fundamental block, creates a unified fabric that can be reconfigured into logic, storage, and interconnection modes. We achieve multiple times of logic capacity compared with FPGAs' logic blocks and multi-level interconnections inside the tiles, which are used to solve the routing overhead problem in FPGAs. Moreover, the global routing complexity is further reduced by the proposed function synthesis framework, which isolates logic and memory components, synthesizes and maps them to configured tiles of Meltrix. Experiments show that, when comparing with commercial FPGAs and state-out-of-art Liquid-Silicon, Meltrix achieves 1.89-3.14× performance improvement and 2.08-4.17× power reduction in both logic-intensive and memory-intensive applications.