Area-time estimation of C-based functions for design space exploration

Rapid evaluation of design metrics is essential for hardware-software co-design of hybrid systems on FPGAs. However, acquisition of design metrics from high-level programs is costly and/or time-consuming, and this prohibits rapid design space exploration. We will present a rapid area-time estimation technique that is capable of obtaining hardware design metrics of all the functions of the given C-based application in a fraction of the time required by FPGA implementation. We will demonstrate the proposed area-time estimation technique as part of an open source high-level synthesis tool. For the application considered, we show that the proposed method, which takes into account the effects of hardware binding during estimation, leads to a reduction in estimation error of more than 35 and 8 times for Altera Cyclone II and Stratix IV FPGA respectively.