A strategy for design space exploration

Abstract

In this report, we present an architectural classification based on four design features: customization, slicing direction, parallelism and pipelining. We also propose a strategy for exploring the architectural space of a design by varying these design features in a systematic way. We believe that design exploration carried out in such a manner will not only save considerable designer time and effort but also result in more cost-effective designs. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our exploration strategy we give the results of applying it on four examples: a timer system, an FIR filter, an FFT datapath, and a robot kinematics system.