Presynthesis Area Estimation of Reconfigurable Streaming Accelerators

In this paper, we propose algorithms for presynthesis estimation of hardware cost of a streaming accelerator. Our proposed estimation method helps to accelerate the design-space-exploration phase by orders of magnitude by eliminating the need to perform logic and physical synthesis in each iteration. We present algorithms to perform early cost estimation of resources that are specific to a streaming accelerator, and we evaluate our techniques using an industrial tool flow and a set of streaming benchmarks. For the register-queue sizes, our estimations are in the range of 28%-9% of actual synthesis results on average, depending on the given resource constraints, while the datapath area estimations are within 14%. A typical estimation requires less than a minute, while generating the configuration bitstream of a streaming accelerator can take as much as 30 min according to our experiments. Considering several repetitions of the synthesis stage for the design space exploration, our estimation framework yields an order of magnitude speedup.