Parameterised system design based on genetic algorithms

A recent reduction in the time to market has led to the development of a new approach to IP-based design in which a highly parametric pre-designed system-on-a-chip is configured according to the application it will have to execute. The greatest problems in this area regard exploration of the range of possible system configurations in search of the optimal configuration for a given system. There are, in fact, a number of parameters involved (bus sizes, cache configurations , software algorithms, etc.), each of which has a great impact on design constraints such as area, power and performance. An exhaustive analysis of all possible configurations is thus computationally unfeasible. In this paper we propose using genetic algorithms to determine the optimal configuration for a highly parametric system. The approach is applied to the search for the optimal configuration (in terms of area, power and mean access time) of a memory hierarchy involved in a given application