Publication

A Memory Efficient Lock-Free Circular Queue

Citation

IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2021

Abstract

Hardware queues are import in many applications,such as data transfer, synchronization of concurrent modules with the need of mutual exclusion constructs. State of the art bounded(of a fixed size) lock free circular queues are implemented either by read/write atomic operations, or barrier conditions, orby separating dequeue and enqueue operations. However, the equeues always require an unused element at all the times to safe-guard the front and rear pointers of the queue, so as to avoid data race conditions, which leads to the waste of memory. The waste of memory is especially disadvantageous in applications such as I/O data transfer, and image transfer between processing filters, when large element size is needed, We propose a lock-free solution of the bounded circular queue through read/write atomic operations, but without the need of an extra element in the queue. The proposed solution is implemented and verified in both Verilog and ’C’ languages. We also demonstrate its effectiveness by comparing its area and delay metrics with the implementations of other existing designs of queue.

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Last Updated: March 31, 2021 - 10:47 am