Design Automation at the Crossroads

Embedded and electronic system design teams face the challenge of reducing development time and costs while improving quality, performance, and functionality. However, increased system complexity is raising the cost of verification, in some cases to as much as 70% of the overall project cost. As verification consumes more time, it eliminates opportunities for engineers to create product differentiation through design optimisation and to focus on innovation.

This problem manifests itself differently across industries:

• Engineers at electronics OEMs and suppliers try every possible verification technology, hoping to avoid the re-spin that will halt their race-to-market with the next generation device.
• Automotive and aerospace engineers conduct extensive design and code reviews to confirm software in dozens of embedded processors meets design requirements.
• Industrial automation engineers struggle to design and integrate increasingly complex control and mechatronic systems with hardware prototypes in the lab.

These scenarios share two common problems: the difficulty of determining whether designs and implementations meet requirements; and the waste involved with manual testing and rework. These challenges stem from fundamental workflow gaps across stages of development and disconnected tools used by component design teams. Even if each component is designed well and tested extensively, issues related to requirements and integration are often found towards the end of the development process.

Anticipating an economic upturn following the current recession, industry-leading companies are looking for ways to seize an advantage over rivals by simultaneously reducing their costs of test and verification while strengthening their ability to develop innovative new products faster. They accomplish these seemingly contradictory goals by adopting early verification with Model-Based Design. Early verification starts with an executable system specification that can be used for virtual integration and testing prior to hardware/software design partitioning and component implementation. This approach enables multidomain system modelling and simulation across component boundaries, as well as reuse of system models as a test harness throughout the hardware and software development process.

Early verification can be approached from a variety of starting points that accommodate existing development flows. Leading companies in industries as varied as consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, and aerospace have adopted early verification, improving their development efficiency by reducing testing time and effort, and finding design flaws earlier. Testing is no longer performed only at the end of the design process, nor is verification limited to checking the result of implementation transformations. Rather, engineers at these companies use system models to verify that requirements are met throughout the development process. The end result is that engineers can cycle through design iterations faster, producing better designs and implementations that work the first time. This efficiency shortens development time, reduces verification costs, and brings new products to market faster.
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