One of the greatest challenges in a C/C++-based design methodology is efficiently mapping C/C++ models into hardware. Many networking and multimedia applications implemented in hardware or mixed hardware/software systems now use complex data structures stored in multiple memories, so many C/C++ features that were originally designed for software applications are now making their way into hardware. Such features include dynamic memory allocation and pointers for managing data. We present a solution for efficiently mapping arbitrary C code with pointers and malloc/free into hardware. Our solution, which fits current memory management methodologies, instantiates an application-specific hardware memory allocator coupled with a memory architecture. Our work also supports the resolution of pointers without restriction on the data structures. We present an implementation based on the SUIF framework along with case studies such as the realization of a video filter and an ATM segmentation engine.

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One of the greatest challenges in C/C++-based design methodology is to efficiently map C/C++ models into hardware. Many of the networking and multimedia applications implemented in hardware or mixed hardware/software systems are making use of complex data structures stored in one or multiple memories. As a result, many of the C/C++ features which were originally designed for software applications are now making their way into hardware. Such features include dynamic memory allocation and pointers used to manage data. We present a solution for efficiently mapping arbitrary C code with pointers and malloc/free into hardware. Our solution fits current memory management methodologies. It consists of instantiating a hardware allocator tailored to an application and a memory architecture. Our work also supports the resolution of pointers without restriction on the data structures. An implementation using the SUIF framework is presented, followed by some case studies such as the realization of a video filter.