Design explorer

A travel guide to an infinte universe. That is what Yannick Le Moullec tries to make when he explores design solutions for embedded systems.

'Design Space exploration´. That is the title of what post.doc. Yannick Le Moullec is working on. In layman's terms this means that he is exploring the potentials in different designs for embedded systems. 

"You could say that I'm trying to give advice as to which kinds of designs are most suiatable for solving which kinds of problems. In principle, there is an infinite number of possible designs for any problem, and my job is to limit it a little," Yannick Le Moullec says.

Basis in experiences

For this purpose, Yannick Le Moullec has developed the programme Design Trotter, which uses experiences and rules of thumb to offer suggestions on the basis of input and guidelines.

"The idea is to have the designer tell the programme what he needs to construct, how large it can be, how long it can take, how much power it can consume etc., and then the programme will offer different design solutions," Yannick Le Moullec explains.

Qualities and efficiency

The way you design your hardware has a great influence on the qualities of an embedded system. Therefore, it is important to find the design solutioin closest to the qualities you wish to have.

"Design Trotter arbejder works in two parts, so to speak. First, the programme adds different input to a certain design and calculates values for different qualities. In that way, we can see whether the design gets high scores on the qualities we want it to have. Then the programme initiates scheduling. This meas, in layman's terms, that the programme figures out how efficiently the job will be solved in the current design. The job may be solved to perfection, but if it takes large amounts of power and storage space, that might not be the ideal solution," Yannick Le Moullec says.

Latest news

In order to ensure that Design Trotter continually offers the best possible solutions, Yannick Le Moullec has to keep in touch with what is going on in ther world within the field of embedded systems.

"It stands to reason that if I see an interesting new design, I need to incorporate it into my programme and find out which qualities that design possesses. It might be exactly the design solution that is best suitable for the next job," Yannick Le Moullec says.