Efficient design space exploration for embedded systems
Simon Künzli · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2006
Design space exploration is an important factor in embedded systems design.During several steps in a state-of-the-art design flow, designers have to decide between many design alternatives.The decisions are located at various levels of abstraction.In addition, the choices affect several design goals, the alternatives therefore represent a multi-criteria decision problem.Further, the space of possible solutions is normally very large, i.e., many design alternatives exist.As a consequence, exhaustive search of the design space is prohibitive, and more sophisticated techniques have to be used to find "good" solutions.To judge the quality of a new design, the performance of a system for a given application is one core criterion.Potential performance metrics are memory demand, response time, or data throughput of an application.As a consequence, one may ask the following questions: