Virtual component co-design-applying function architecture Co-design to automotive applications

摘要

System design is moving from a trial-and-error manual process towards a more rigorous and tool-supported approach. The driving junction for this move is the need to develop new products quickly, correctly and inexpensively. Time-to-market of four to six months are not uncommon today for some electronic systems. At the same time there is a need to leverage maximally what Deep Sub-Micron (DSM) technology has to offer to compete. Hence an approach that has design re-use as its main goal has great potential to increase productivity of the industry as a whole. The basic tenets of the design methodology have been incorporated into the Cadence VCC environment for Virtual Component Co-Design. They are function-architecture co-design, mapping of functions to flexible and programmable architectures, and efficient and automatic implementation of actual code on the programmable components of the architecture. This paper will illustrate these principles using the automotive applications as an example. Besides the different steps of the actual function architecture codesign methodology we will show and summarize the lessons learned from design projects. We will outline how it has been possible to capture junctions and candidate architectures and how the mapping of the junctions to the candidate architectures can be carried out very quickly so as to converge to an "optimal" solution effectively and in a few iterations.