Area Estimation and Eight Microblaze Implementation

Area estimation is helpful as we are approaching the limit of the chip. We can know if the design fits the chip before the time-consuming mapping process. In BlazeCluster, I can just sum up every component's area to get estimation.

The area of components is supposed to be available in their respective documents. However it's not always there and it's time consuming to look into them. A better way can be, because the area information is in the synthesize report, I can simply scan them. Perl script is perfect to do that. And it works.

With the guidance of estimation, I put eight microblaze processors with FPU with PowerPC onto a chip. It's ultra-fast and doesn't take too much time. The design is very scalable. There is little to rework.

After a while, however, I am surprised to find that there is a big difference between estimation and synthesize result, as big as 15%-20%. The reason is probably due to ISE optimization. The estimation of multiplier and BRAM is accurate.