The effects of variations in component styles and shapes on high-level synthesis

High-level synthesis (HLS) has long relied on point models for RT-components that assume fixed area and delay values for a given component style. However, aspect ratio variations alone can result in substantially different area-delay characteristics for a component. In this work, we explore the combined effect of style and aspect ratio variations on the area and delay of individual RT-components, as well as on complete RT-level designs produced by HLS. We describe the results of extensive experiments which indicate that point models are inadequate for use in the synthesis process. We believe that our results have some deep implications on the formulation of HLS algorithms that attempt to realistically incorporate physical design information early in the design process