MARC II: A parametrized speculative multi-ported memory subsystem for reconfigurable computers

We describe a parameterized memory system suitable as target for automatic high-level language to hardware compilers for reconfigurable computers. It fully supports the spatial computation paradigm by allowing the realization of each memory operator by a dedicated hardware memory port. Inter-port coherency is maintained only for those ports that actually require it, and efficient speculative execution is enabled by a dynamic scheme for arbitrating access to shared resources (such as main memory), relying on techniques inspired by the branch prediction of conventional software-programmable processors.