ChipEst-FPGA: a tool for chip level area and timing estimation of lookup table based FPGAs for high level applications

Abstract

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.