ChipEst-FPGA: a tool for chip level area and timing estimation of lookup table based FPGAs for high level applications
Min Xu, Fadi Kurdahi · 2002
The importance of efficient area and timing estimation techniques for hierarchical design methodology is well-established in High-Level Synthesis (HLS), since the estimation allows more realistic exploration of the design space, and hierarchical design methodology matches well with HLS paradigm. In this paper, we present ChipEst-FPGA, a chip level estimator for designs implemented using a hierarchical design methodology for Lookup Table Based FPGAs. In FPGAs, the wire delay may contribute to a significant portion of the overall design delay. ChipEst-FPGA uses a realistic model which takes the component area/delay as well as wiring effects into account. We tested our ChipEst-FPGA on several benchmarks and the results show that we can get accurate area and timing estimates efficiently.