RT COMPONENT SETS FOR HIGH-LEVEL DESIGN APPLICATIONS

The system-level design process typically involves refining a design s pecification down to the point where each of the system's components i s described as a block diagram or netlist of abstract Register-Transfe r (RT) level components. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a standard RT component set, and describe a library environment that s upports automatic model generation, design reuse, and synthesis with t echnology-specific estimators. We demonstrate the efficacy of the stan dard RT-component set approach with experiments performed on the HLSW9 2 benchmarks. Our preliminary results indicate only a small overhead o f about 10% in using these standard, generic components. We then descr ibe an automatic model generation and technology projection scheme tha t 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 inte grated with a high-level synthesis system at U.C. Irvine.