DL-Sort: A Hybrid Approach to Scalable Hardware-Accelerated Fully-Streaming Sorting

Designing high-performance hardware sorter for resource-constrained systems is challenging due to physical limitations and the need to balance streaming bandwidth with memory throughput. This paper introduces a novel, scalable hardware sorter architecture with fully-streaming support and an accompanying RTL generator to provide versatile, energy-efficient hardware acceleration. Our solution employs a dual-layer architecture consisting of a parallel one-way linear insertion sorter (OLIS) for bandwidth optimization and a cyclic bitonic merge network (CBMN) for a compact, high-throughput implementation. Furthermore, we developed the RTL generator written in Chisel to provide the agile implementation of the scalable architecture. Experimental results targeting the Xilinx XVU37P-FSVH2892-2L-E FPGA show that our design achieves throughput increasing by 126.26% and latency decreasing by 68.46%, with an area increment of no more than 132.94% for LUTs and a decrement of flip-flops by 79.84%, compared to state-of-the-art streaming sorter. The source code is available at https://github.com/hyun-woo-oh/DL-Sort-Generator.