A machine learning approach for area prediction of hardware designs from abstract specifications

Advancements of Machine Learning (ML) in the field of computer vision have paved the way for its potential application in many other fields. Researchers and hardware domain experts are exploring possible applications of Machine Learning in optimizing many aspects of hardware development process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for predicting the area of hardware components from specifications. The flow uses an existing RTL generation framework, for generating valid data samples that enable ML algorithms to train the learning models. The approach has been successfully employed to predict the area of real-life hardware components such as Control and Status Register (CSR) interfaces that are ubiquitous in embedded systems. With this approach we are able to predict the area with more than 98% accuracy and 600x faster than the existing methods. In addition, we are able to rank the features according to their importance in final area estimations.