Facilitating guidance provision for an architectural exploration based design creation process

Abstract

Guidance provision to the creation of an electronic design is facilitated through a method that includes facilitating interactive exploration of the electronic design by a designer to aid the designer in formulating his/her guidance, and facilitating the designer in interactively providing the formulated guidance. In one embodiment, facilitation of interactive exploration by the designer include facilitating interactive cross-probing into a number of issues about the design, including generated candidate architectures for the design. In one embodiment, the issues available for cross probing include inter-dependencies of data and mobility of operations of the design, as well as occupation of hardware resources for the generated candidate architectures. In one embodiment, Gantt diagrams are employed to facilitate navigation by the designer in performing the interactive cross probing. Gantt diagrams graphically representing the generated candidate architectures are selectively presented to the designer. Data dependencies may be graphically depicted on the Gantt diagrams. Additionally, various aspects of the generated candidate architectures may be correlated back to the behavioral specification of the electronic design for the designer. In one embodiment, the designer may also modified the constraints on the electronic design interactively, applying the information the designer learned through the interactive exploration.