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Excuse my poor English :-)

I am in a software (for face detection) team and we co-work with the hardware team. If we give the source code to the hardware team, they will try to implement it with hardware.

I thought it would better to first predict and consider the memory size or gate count and then give the code to hardware team.

I really don't know anything about hardware but I heard that hardware can be implemented either SoC type or standalone type.

We are first trying to make it a standalone type so we don't use SRAM to store images and we have to process the image with line memories.

Ahh... I don't even know what I'm saying.. :-(

Anyways Is there a simple and effective way to predict how much memory the source code will require?

And I also want to know about the relationship between memory size and the gate count.

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1  
Maybe your hardware team can advise - or provide examples from previous projects. –  RedGrittyBrick Jan 14 '14 at 13:45
    
Are you using C for programming or what? If your code is in VHDL or Verilog, you can synthesize the code and see the results easily. I assume by "stand-alone" you mean creating your design without the need of a CPU, in that case, the best way of checking your memory requirement is to run it through the synthesis. –  FarhadA Jan 15 '14 at 19:05

2 Answers 2

up vote 1 down vote

If you are thinking of implementing in hardware, you may want to reconsider the algorithms you use - what is appropriate for software is rarely the same as what is good for hardware. You can of course implement exactly what you write in software, but it may be far from optimal.

(One of my day-job tasks is getting in early with algorithm people and working with them to get something at the Matlab stage which stands a chance of working well on the hardware they are wanting to target)

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up vote 0 down vote

Your compiler should be able to output how much memory your code is. When you try to build the project next time, check out your IDEs console. There should be a readout showing how much program memory it will take up.

If it doesn't show up, consider enabling verbose output on your console. It will probably be an option in your preferences, somewhere related to your console or compiler.

I know that for the Xilinx ISE I used to use, it did this.

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