Grey Wolf Optimizer Driven design space exploration: A novel framework for multi-objective trade-off in architectural synthesis

Abstract Initiating Design Space Exploration (DSE) procedure during architectural synthesis is a highly intricate and tedious process. It involves optimal arrangement of resource utilizations within a design search space to resolve conflicting objectives of power-performance as well as area occupied by different types of resources. To arrive at an arrangement with minimum completion time among all of the permuted arrangements is a Non-Polynomial-hard problem. The problem becomes acute when it involves multi-objectives, as in the case of DSE for ensuring reliable power-performance-area trade-off of application specific processors. Many heuristic algorithms are being considered to derive an optimal solution for this multi-objective DSE procedure. A comprehensive mapping process and reliable solution evaluation approach called Grey Wolf Optimizer Driven DSE (GWO-DSE) is proposed in this article. The contributions of the article are as follows: i) Introduction of a novel GWO-DSE methodology for power-performance-area trade-off ii) Unique solution evaluation methodology called Utility Coefficients and Utility Ranking iii) Unique fitness evaluation function Grey wolf optimizer iv) Comparative benchmarks using digital filter transfer functions v) Substantial improvement in solution arrival within search space (average > 51 % ) and reduction in exploration time (>89 % ) when compared to recent DSE approaches for the tested benchmarks.