Design-space exploration (DSE)
Beginner
Trying many combinations of choices to find the best one, like testing different recipes.
Novice
Searching through combinations of settings, such as the target clock speed, how tightly to pack the gates and tool options, to find the ones that give the best power, speed and area.
Expert
Each sample is a tool run that takes minutes to hours and gives slightly different results from run to run, so the budget is tens to hundreds of samples. Methods range from grid sweeps to Bayesian optimization, TPE, evolutionary search and RL. Results depend on how the goals are weighted and on run-to-run noise.