Process Model Based Methodology for Impact Analysis of New Design Methods

What is the impact of new design methodologies and methods on the industrial product development process and its productivity? This is one of the key questions for today's industrial engineering companies when they decide on the introduction of new methods or tools, as well as for researchers and tool providers when they assess their ideas and work. A quantitative (at best monetary) assessment of a new design method's value and impact will increase a manager's decision basis significantly and will lead to well directed investments in process optimisations. It is not sufficient to analyse the impact of a new design method just for the specific process step it is applied to. Implications on following steps, sometimes on the whole engineering process must be considered as well. Furthermore, decisions on the use of new design methods must be made on a multi-criteria basis through the well-known cost/time/quality triangle (e.g. Burghardt, 2006)

Impact simulation of changes to development processes: An ESL case study

Due to the ever increasing need for enhanced productivity in electronic system design new methods and tools in the area of Electronic System Level (ESL) design are becoming more important. Regrettably, the introduction of new methods and tools come at a certain cost, and after its introduction it might be hard to assess the real improvements in the development process. In this paper we present a methodology to model the design process and linked cause-effects based on experience and statistical data. In our case-study we create two models of the same design flow: 1st traditional design flow and 2nd ESL design flow using high-level synthesis. By means of Monte Carlo simulations we automatically process 10.000 probabilistically varied benchmark runs so that the causalities in the modeled development process become clear and the impact of changes to the flow can be predicted prior to their implementation

Impact Estimation for Design Flow Changes

Global markets dictate the continuous improvement of the efficiency of any industries' development processes. This is especially true for the industry of integrated circuits. Unfortunately, it is usually not obvious how one can improve development processes to stay in business. Some few time-consuming benchmark runs cannot deliver a deep insight in new process methodologies and company specific best practices. In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to estimate the impact of process changes on effort, cost and quality in an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flow using a defined methodology and our IMPACT tool. We simulate a design flow 10.000 times in a probabilistic manner and analyze the influence of cause-effect relationships on the development effort and costs. This approach allows the prediction of process behavior prior to the implementation of process changes

RISC-V Timing-Instructions for Open Time-Triggered Architectures

Time-triggered architectures (TTAs) were a key enabler for time-predictable software execution and, thus, for cyber-physical and embedded systems with real-time requirements. Controlling software-execution by the means of timer-controlled interrupts and a predetermined schedule, TTAs are a common standard to ensure timing in safety-critical systems. Now, with the emerge of the openly available RISC-V architectures and the use of its instruction-set extension allows to easily provide softcore-processors with an application-specific instruction-set configuration. To support the realtime-capability of such RISC-V based, application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs), the presented approach provides timing-instructions as a RISC-V instruction-set extension to measure and control the software execution-time at the hardware-level

Economic Impact Estimation of New Design Methods

New design methods and tools often promise large benefits for specific engineering tasks or whole engineering processes to make increasingly complex and sophisticated products possible. However, estimations for the pay-off of new methods or tools are based on gut feelings or rare expert knowledge. In this paper we present our approach for well-founded quantitative estimations for the economic impact of new methods or tools. We show the beginning of our methodology with an early experiment and the impact analysis for a case study of a design flow for electronic circuits