DesertFD: a finite-domain constraint based tool for design space exploration

作者:Eames Brandon K*; Neema Sandeep K; Saraswat Rohit
来源:Design Automation for Embedded Systems, 2010, 14(1): 43-74.
DOI:10.1007/s10617-009-9049-z

摘要

As the complexity of computer based systems increases, designers are faced with the task of balancing a variety of design choices and parameters against conflicting optimization criteria. Design space exploration seeks to automate or partially automate the process of evaluating tradeoff decisions at design time. DesertFD is a domain-independent design space exploration tool which facilitates the representation and pruning of a design space using constraint satisfaction. DesertFD offers a formal tree-based view of a family of systems related through common structure, together with a flexible scripting language for modeling mathematical expressions governing property composition. User-specified constraints applied to the design space representation result in a pruning of the space. We discuss the reduction of the design space, property composition formulas and constraints into a constraint satisfaction problem using finite domain constraints. We examine two example design space exploration problems to evaluate DesertFD: the generation of a high level custom computer architecture for supporting H.264-based motion estimation, and the reliability-driven mapping of tasks to distributed embedded control units in a steer-by-wire automotive application.

  • 出版日期2010-3