Tianji Liu, Qijing Wang, Lixin Liu, Fangzhou Wang and Prof. Evangeline F.Y. Young won the second place in the 2022 CAD Contest at ICCAD for the topic “Microarchitecture Design Space Exploration”. The CAD Contest at ICCAD is a challenging research and development competition, focusing on advanced, real-world problems in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The topic “Microarchitecture Design Space Exploration” is provided by DAMO Academy, Alibaba. Microarchitecture is an implementation of a given instruction set architecture (ISA). For example, it decides the detailed implementation of different modules in processors (CPUs). Due to the high complexity of modern processors and the high cost of the very-large-scale integration (VLSI) verification flow for evaluating the performance, power, and area (PPA) of microarchitectures, it is crucial to develop an effective design space exploration methodology that is able to provide samples and hints of potentially good microarchitecture parameters for processor designers.
