A Comparison of Hierarchical Compile Strategies by Steve Golson
Abstract: A wealth of new hierarchical compile strategies have become available in the last few years. This paper will compare area, speed, and compile time for several large designs using a variety of hierarchical compile strategies: top-down compile, top-down simple compile, bottom-up with default constraints, bottom-up with hand-crafted constraints, and ACS (Automated Chip Synthesis).
You can download a tarball of all of the scripts, constraint files, and Makefiles described in the paper.
Get more information about the picoJava-II design from Sun Microsystems.
Here are Perl scripts for doing scatter_plots and ratio_plots. These scripts take timing reports from Synopsys Design Compiler and generate commands for gnuplot.
My SNUG 1999 paper used similar plotting techniques.