Implementation and Evaluation of a DMA Controller for PCIe-based FPGA Boards

Heehoon Kim, Jaejin Lee

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2021.48.2.141

An FPGA is an integrated circuit designed to be reconfigurable multiple times at runtime, which shows great performance and energy efficiency in modern applications such as deep learning and big data processing. Major FPGA vendors produce PCIe-based FPGA boards to use FPGAs as accelerators. To transfer large data between a host system and an FPGA, a DMA controller should be implemented inside the FPGA. In previous work, however, controllers did not fully utilize the PCIe bandwidth or were unable to send and receive simultaneously. This paper presents a new DMA controller architecture that can utilize the full-duplex bandwidth of a PCIe link. The DMA controller is implemented and evaluated on a board with Intel Stratix 10 FPGA. The results show that our controller is up to 2.3 times faster than the controller shipped with Intel FPGA Acceleration Stack.