Rapid performance estimation for system design

The ability to gauge the effect of any design decision on system performance is important in the design process. Given a behavioral description and the functional-unit allocation, we describe a method for rapidly estimating the number of control steps required to implement the design. Extensions for pipelined functional units and multi-port memory accesses are also presented. Using flow-analysis, we then show how process execution times and related performance metrics can be computed to aid design space exploration.