New Strategies for System-Level Design

With complexities of Systems-on-Chip (SOCs) rising almost daily, the design community has been searching for a new methodology that can handle given complexities with increased productivity and decreased time-to-market. The obvious solution that comes to mind is increasing levels of abstraction, or in other words, increasing the size of the basic building blocks. However, it is not clear what these basic blocks should be and what should be the strategy for creating a system design out of these basic blocks. To make things more difficult, the difference between software and hardware is becoming indistinguishable which, in turn, requires sizable change in the industrial and academic infrastructure. In order to find the solution, we will look first at the system gap between SW and HW designs and derive requirements for the system design flow that includes software as well as hardware. In order to enable new tools for model generation, simulation, synthesis and verification, the design flow has to be well defined with unique abstraction levels, model semantics and model transformations that correspond to design decisions made by designers. We will introduce the concept of model algebra that supports such a design flow and can serve as an enabler for the new approach in globally-collaborative system design and, consequently, global system industry. In order to demonstrate our approach we will use MP3 example and show increased simplicity and huge productivity gains for complex systems. We will explain the benefits and finish with a prediction and a roadmap toward the final goal of increasing productivity by several orders of magnitude while reducing expertise level needed for design of billion-transistor systems to the basic principles of design science only.