Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Many (Electronics) Gates Is That Software Algorithm?
dryriver writes: Dear Slashdotters: We have developed a graphics algorithm that got an electronics manufacturer interested in turning it into hardware. Here comes the problematic bit... The electronics manufacturer asked us to describe how complex the algorithm is. More specifically, we were asked "How many (logic) gates would be needed to turn your software algorithm into hardware?" This threw us a bit, since none of us have done electronics design before. So here is the question: Is there are a software or other tool that can analyze an algorithm written in C/C++ and estimate how many gates would be needed to turn it into hardware? Or, perhaps, there is a more manual method of converting code lines to gates? Maybe an operation like "Add" would require 3 gates while an operation like "Divide" would need 6 gates? Something like this anyway... To state the question one more time: How do we get from a software algorithm that is N lines long and executes X number of total operations overall, to a rough estimate of how many gates this algorithm would use when translated into electronic hardware?