Co-operative memory system to facilitate searching

Abstract

The advancements in VLSI technologies enabled the integration of memory and processor on the same chip. This close proximity of storage and processing units then became the main driving force for the concept referred to as Intelligent Co-operative Memory. The concept is to offload the data-intensive operations (which constitute the processor-memory performance bottleneck) from centre CPU to the processing units integrated in memory, such that the system performance degradation due to bus load/throughput/delay problems can be reduced. A common class of data-intensive operation is to perform searching in a pile of unorganized data records, which typically requires large amount of memory access when building up the supportive search data structures. In this project, a processing unit is proposed to be integrated with the memory to automatically generate a hash table for all the search keys, such that simple hash table look ups would locate the target record from a pile of unorganized data. The system was implemented with a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA device, and a test case environment was developed allowing the co-operative memory to facilitate searching on a set of FFT transformed frequency domain data.