Comparison between the Simulator and Scheduler based approach of Design Space Exploration for Application Specific Instruction set Processor

An Application Specific Instruction set Processor (ASIP) is a processor designed for a particular application or for a set of applications. An ASIP exploits special characteristics of application(s) to meet the desired performance, cost and power requirements. ASIP Design Space Exploration can be carried out by one of the two popular available techniques as Simulator or Scheduler based approach. This paper is an attempt to survey and compare both the mentioned techniques of design space exploration of ASIP. A list of explored design space parameters using simulator based approach is included in this paper. This paper also highlights few potential parameters which can be explored using the scheduler based approach.