Execution-time profiling for multiple-process behavioral synthesis

Abstract

This paper presents a technique for back-annotating the results of high-level synthesis into the source description to produce a timing-accurate behavioral simulation model. The resulting simulation model exhibits the same cycle-by-cycle behavior as a register-transfer level model, but can be simulated in a fraction of the time. This idea has analogies both to software profiling and to back-annotation at lower levels of hardware design. Experimental results demonstrate that the annotated behavioral simulation models run two to three orders of magnitude faster than register-transfer level simulation models, and only about an order of magnitude slower than behavioral models with no timing information.