On Advanced Methodologies for Microarchitecture Design Space Exploration

With the ever-increasing complexity of microprocessors, microarchitectural design becomes over-challenging. Design space exploration (DSE) of microarchitecture configurations to obtain high-quality designs with different PPA trade-offs is time-consuming, due to the huge configuration space and inefficient VLSI verification flow. Many DSE frameworks proposed in previous works failed to systematically analyze the contribution of each algorithmic component to the full flow. This paper provides a novel methodology for designing DSE frameworks by separating DSE flow into stages, and discussing algorithmic instantiations in each stage with theoretical and experimental analyses. Newly formulated DSE frameworks guided by this methodology achieve state-of-the-art results in ICCAD’22 DSE contest evaluation environments.