RT Component Sets for High‐Level Design Applications
Nikil D. Dutt, Pradip K. Jha · VLSI design · 1997
The system‐level design process typically involves refining a design specification down to the point where each of the system′s components is described as a block diagram or netlist of abstract Register‐Transfer (RT) level components. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a standard RT component set, and describe a library environment that supports automatic model generation, design reuse, and synthesis with technology‐specific estimators. We demonstrate the efficacy of the standard RT‐component set approach with experiments performed on the HLSW92 benchmarks. Our preliminary results indicate only a small overhead of about 10% in using these standard, generic components. We then describe an automatic model generation and technology projection scheme that uses fast (on‐line) estimators for predicting the area and delay of generic RT components tuned to a particular technology library with an accuracy of 10%. These model generators and estimators have been integrated with a high‐level synthesis system at U.C. Irvine.