Patent ID: 7984412
Filing Date: 2011-07-19
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method of estimating a performance characteristic of integrated circuit (IC) designs having an intellectual property (“IP”) core comprising: pre-characterizing element types of the IC designs to provide respective resource estimations of the element types; wherein each resource estimation indicates how performance of a mid-level element varies according to a user-selectable value of a parameter of the IP core, and the performance includes one or more of latency, maximum clock speed, IC resource requirements, power consumption, or throughput; acquiring mid-level elements of the IP core, each mid-level element being one of the element types; selecting a value of the parameter of the IP core; running a first IC design of the IC designs on a design tool using the resource estimations to model the mid-level elements of the IP core to return a first performance value of the first IC design; and running a second IC design of the IC designs on the design tool using the resource estimations to model the mid-level elements of the IP core to return a second performance value of the second IC design; wherein the first and second performance values indicate one or more of latency, maximum clock speed, IC resource requirements, power consumption, or throughput of the first and second IC designs, respectively; and the steps of acquiring and running are performed with a programmed processor.