Fast and accurate resource estimation of RTL-based designs targeting FPGAS

FPGAs have become complex, heterogeneous platforms targeting a multitude of different applications. Understanding how a design maps to them and consumes various FPGA resources can be difficult to predict, so typically designers are forced to run full synthesis on each iteration of the design. For complex designs that involve many iterations and optimizations, the run-time of synthesis can be quite prohibitive. In this paper, we describe a fast and accurate method of estimating the FPGA resources of any RTL-based design. We achieve run-times that are more than 60 times faster than synthesis and is on average within 22% of the actual mapped slices across a large benchmark suite targeting three different FPGA families. This resource estimator tool is first provided in Xilinx PlanAhead 10.1.