In this paper, we present a new design-space exploration approach which we call the symbolic program approach. The symbolic program approach is based on both the trace driven approach and the control data flow graph approach. As expected, the trajectory of the symbolic program approach appears somewhere in-between the two extremes mentioned above. Thus, it leads to the shorter simulation time while it can still give fairly accurate performance numbers. Moreover, it produces results that can be readily taken as input for further design. Keywords: System-level, design-space exploration traces, CDFG, symbolic programs.