DESCOMP: A New Design Space Exploration Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new approach in Design-Space-Exploration (DSE) for non-clustered VLIW architectures. It differs from existing techniques by using a “bottom-up” strategy. While other approaches start with the design of an architecture, followed by building a possible schedule, we firstly build a schedule and after that an architecture is synthesized, which is suitable to execute this schedule. So, the results can be obtained fully automatically and in very short time. Furthermore, we can explore arbitrary types of functional units without increasing the design space exploration time significantly. We evaluated our method and compared the obtained results to an existing DSE approach for clustered and non-clustered architectures. We almost always obtain better results in the case of non-clustered architectures. In many cases the ports of the register file are decreased, which, in consequence, leads to higher clock rates. Compared to the results for clustered architectures for some examples our non-clustered architecture is better than the best clustered one.