Automatic Generation of Cycle-Accurate Timing Models from RTL for Hardware Accelerators

Simulation is widely used during different stages of hardware development. This paper focuses on one specific type of simulation – cycle-accurate timing simulation, which measures the number of cycles for a given computation. We propose a pioneering approach for automatically generating cycle-accurate timing models of hardware accelerators from their RTL designs based on dependency analysis and constraint solving, making this the first technique of its kind in this domain. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach for six non-trivial designs. We show that our method achieves a 1.5x-6.9x speedup for cycle-accurate simulation over RTL models for computation-intensive accelerators, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our approach provides a cost-effective way to quickly determine the execution time of accelerators.