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: 1^st traditional design flow and 2^nd 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.