An evaluative study of RT component libraries

The system-level design process typically involves refining a design specification down to the point where each of the system's components is described as a block diagram or netlist of abstract Register-Transfer (RT) level components. Although no standard set of RT components seems to exist across different design methodologies and backend technologies, on closer examination, we see that there indeed does seem to be a universally accepted set of RT-components that are used in the initial phase of design refinement, much before its implementation in a particular target technology. In this report, we describe the need for such a standard RT component set, describe such a parameterized library of standard (or generic) RT components, and evaluate its utility in the system design process. We survey several backend technology libraries, and study the relative coverage of the generic RT component library with respect to these target technology libraries. We then describe the problem of high-level technology mapping, and illustrate this process for a few RT components. Finally, we perform a set of experiments on the HLSW92 benchmarks to evaluate the usefulness of generic RT component libraries. In particular, we compute the overhead incurred by using a generic RT component library over directly using the technology-specific components for the selected benchmark designs. Our preliminary results indicate that the penalty in using the generic components is quite low (approximately 10%}, and is more than compensated by the advantages of designing with a generic RT component library