Efficient methods for embedded system design space exploration

Design space exploration is the process of analyzing several functionally equivalent alternatives to determine the most suitable one. The synchronous assumption has made it possible to develop efficient procedures for establishing functional equivalence between different implementations in the domain of synchronous circuits as well as in the domain of synchronous reactive systems. We extend this notion to embedded systems that do not satisfy the synchronous assumption inside their boundaries but only at the interface with the environment Leveraging this property, we developed efficient synchronous equivalence analysis algorithms for embedded systems with loops and architectures with multiple computational units. We demonstrate our method on an ATM switch containing many interacting components.

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