Optimization for Metrics

The following table shows the first directive you should think about adding to your design.

A common issue when hardware functions are first compiled is report files showing the latency and interval as a question mark “?” rather than as numerical values. If the design has loops with variable loop bounds, the compiler cannot determine the latency or II and uses the “?” to indicate this condition. Variable loop bounds are where the loop iteration limit cannot be resolved at compile time, as when the loop iteration limit is an input argument to the hardware function, such as variable height, width, or depth parameters.

To resolve this condition, use the hardware function report to locate the lowest level loop which fails to report a numerical value and use the LOOP_TRIPCOUNT directive to apply an estimated tripcount. The tripcount is the minimum, average, and/or maximum number of expected iterations. This allows values for latency and interval to be reported and allows implementations with different optimizations to be compared.

Because the LOOP_TRIPCOUNT value is only used for reporting, and has no impact on the resulting hardware implementation, any value can be used. However, an accurate expected value results in more useful reports.