Boosting FPGA Performance with Direct BRAM-DSP Paths

Abstract: Efficient data movement between memory and compute units is a key performance bottleneck in modern FPGA designs, particularly for deep learning (DL) workloads. In typical FPGA architectures, data transfers between block RAMs (BRAMs) and digital signal processing units (DSPs) must traverse the global routing network, leading to increased wirelength, routing congestion, and critical-path delays. Prior work has explored in- and near-BRAM compute architectures to mitigate these issues, but such solutions often require fundamental changes to FPGA architecture and CAD tools, limiting their commercial viability. This paper proposes a lightweight architectural enhancement that introduces a dedicated direct connection between BRAM and DSP blocks, enabling BRAM data to be consumed by DSPs without passing through the global interconnect. We also enhance the placement algorithm to recognize these BRAM-DSP macro blocks. The proposed architectural change incurs negligible area and delay overhead and does not affect non-DL benchmarks, while the proposed CAD remains compatible with the baseline architecture, where it yields negligible change in quality-of-results (QoR). On an Agilex-10-like FPGA, the proposed architecture and CAD updates deliver up to +25% Fmax and -49% wirelength on common DL layer designs.