Evaluation of design space exploration strategies

The design space exploration (DSE) subsystem of a design automation tool is responsible for early identification of interesting zones of the design space. Evaluation of the exploration strategy used in a tool is extremely difficult because there is not enough information about either the design space or the actual cost function. This paper describes a software environment for quantitative evaluation of isolated exploration algorithms based on a completely simulated framework. A simple model of the design space allows easy representation of interesting properties of exploration algorithms