A Benchmarking Platform for DDR4 Memory Performance in Data-Center-Class FPGAs

FPGAs are increasingly utilized in data centers due to their ability to exploit parallelism in computationally intensive workloads. Modern workloads demand the transfer of vast amounts of information, making it essential to optimize communication between FPGAs and memory. This paper introduces a novel benchmarking platform for evaluating DDR4 memory performance in data-center-class FPGAs. The proposed solution features highly configurable traffic generation with complex memory access patterns defined at run time and can be flexibly instantiated on the target FPGA to support multiple memory channels and varying data rates. An extensive experimental campaign targets the AMD Kintex UltraScale 115 FPGA, encompassing up to three memory channels with data rates ranging from 1600 to 2400 MT/s. The results demonstrate the benchmaking platform’s capability to effectively evaluate DDR4 performance across various memory traffic configurations.