For some FPGA target families, such as the Virtex-5, you can estimate how many resources your FPGA VI uses without compiling the FPGA VI. LabVIEW uses a Xilinx tool to estimate the number of slices, LUTs, and flip-flops that FPGA VI will use. Estimating resources before compiling allows you to decide if your FPGA design is close to fitting on the FPGA without waiting minutes to hours for the compilation to complete.

Complete the following steps to estimate the FPGA resource usage for an FPGA application.

1. Right-click an FPGA build specification and select Estimate Resource Usage from the shortcut menu to begin the resource estimation process. If the Estimate Resource Usage menu item is not available, the target does not support this feature.
2. Follow the status of the process in the Compilation Status window.
3. When the report is ready, select Estimated device utilization (pre-synthesis) from the Reports pull-down menu to display the report.