Accurate models for estimating area and power of FPGA implementations

This paper presents accurate area and power estimation models for implementations using FPGAs from the Xilinx Virtex-2Pro family. These models are designed to facilitate efficient design space exploration in an automated algorithm-architecture codesign framework. Detailed models for accurately estimating the number of slices, block RAMs and 18×18-bit multipliers for fixed point and floating-point IP cores have been developed. These models are also utilized to develop accurate power models that consider the effect of logic power, signal power, clock power and I/O power. In all cases, the model coefficients have been derived by using curve fitting or regression analysis. The modeling error for the IP cores is very small (average 0.95%). The error for fairly large examples such as floating point implementation of 8-point FFTs is also quite small; it is 1.87% for estimation of number of slices and 3.48% for estimation of power consumption.