Clock skew estimate modeling for FPGA high-level synthesis and its application

Recently, high-level synthesis (HLS) techniques for FPGA designs are required in various applications. Clock network in FPGA has already been built before implementing any circuits, which may lead a large impact of clock skews and then degrade operation frequency. In this paper, we formulate a clock skew estimate model for FPGA-HLS (CSEF). CSEF is an accurate model to estimate clock skews in HLS flow. CSEF is then integrated into a floorplan-aware HLS algorithm targeting FPGA designs. Experimental results demonstrate that our HLS algorithm can realize FPGA designs which reduce the latency by up to 19% compared with conventional approaches.