Algorithmic/Architectural Design Space Exploration

The classical top—down digital design flow is based on a strict separation between different layers of abstraction and design representations (See also Chap. 2). The introduction of these layers of abstraction brought many advantages: unnecessary details remain hidden and only relevant parameters for the current design step are exposed. This allows the designer to handle very large designs and keep the complexity under control. Moreover, the abstraction layers enabled the evolution towards more and more design reuse and design automation.

This classical top—down flow, however, poses some problems in designs were energy-efficiency matters. The main reason for that is exactly this strict separation between the different layers of abstractions and the different design representations: for example, at algorithmic/architectural level, the algorithms are developed first, without any circuit or architectural knowledge. Only in a second step, the architecture is derived from the finished algorithms. Further, in the design flow, all subblock parameters are optimized towards the target performance. Only in the final stages of the design flow, the resulting power consumption can be computed (See Sect. 2.3 of Chap. 2).