Decision guide environment for design space exploration

In current embedded system design practice, only few architectural solutions and mappings of the functionalities of a system on the architecture´s components are examined. This paper presents an optimization-based method and the associated tool developed to help designers take architectural decisions. The principle of this approach is to efficiently explore the design space and to dynamically provide the user with the capabilities to visualize the evolution of selected criteria. The first objective is solved by developing an enhanced version of the adaptive simulated annealing algorithm. Since the method is iterative, multiple solutions may be examined and the tool lets the user stop exploration at any time, tune parameters and select solutions. Moreover we present an approach for systems whose functionalities are specified by means of multiple models of computation, in order to handle descriptions of digital signal applications at several levels of detail. The tool has been applied to a motion detection application in order to determine architectural parameters