Early performance-cost estimation of application-specific data path pipelining

Application-specific processors (ASPs) are increasingly being adopted for optimized implementation of embedded systems. ASP design automation tools are, therefore, critical for meeting the time-to-market goals for ASP-based embedded systems. This paper targets the problem of determining the optimal data path pipeline configuration from a given application C code. We propose a technique for automatically estimating the application execution time on an ASP for various data path pipeline configurations based on estimated clock cycle length and estimated number of cycles. In addition, we compute the cost of each pipelined design, thereby characterizing the ASP by its performance and cost. Our estimation enables fast, accurate and early analysis of trade-offs between different data path pipeline configurations, without the need for creating either a prototype or a cycle-accurate model of the ASP. Our experimental results, based on industrial applications, demonstrate high fidelity for the performance estimation.