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

• Published in: Design automation for embedded systems 2010-03, Vol.14 (1), p.43-74
• Main Authors: Eames, Brandon K., Neema, Sandeep K., Saraswat, Rohit
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: CAE) and Design; Circuits and Systems; Computer-Aided Engineering (CAD; Engineering; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems
• ISSN: 0929-5585; 1572-8080
• DOI: 10.1007/s10617-009-9049-z

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.