RT Component Sets for High-Level Design Applications

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.