Flex-DMA: design of high-performance multi-transfer mode DMA system

With the rapid development of data intensive science and high-throughput applications, ASIC designs in special fields are constantly emerging. The transmission system has more needs besides data transmission, and some existing Data Memory Access (DMA) designs can already support efficient matrix transpose transmission. However, these designs cannot meet the complex memory access mode and do not have flexible configurability, resulting in low computational efficiency. Aimed at these problems, a configurable multi-mode transmission system Flex-DMA is designed, which includes configurable registers and transmission channels, and has multiple transmission modes such as basic mode and Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) mode. Due to its configurability, Flex-DMA can select different transmission modes based on various data transmission requirements, flexibly configure data scale and data format, and support vector instruction data conversion and matrix transposition. The performance evaluation of Flex-DMA in a massively parallel simulation framework shows that Flex-DMA can achieve an average speed up of 5.14 times in vectorization processing. In addition, Flex-DMA can achieve an average performance improvement of 2.52 times compared with MT-DMA structures. Experiments prove that Flex-DMA is able to meet complex memory access modes and transmission requirements, and realize data reorganization and preprocessing with low transmission latency.