Engineering change: methodology and applications to behavioral and system synthesis

Due to the unavoidable need for system debugging, performance tuning, and adaptation to new standards, the engineering change (EC) methodology has emerged as one of the crucial components in synthesis of systems-on-chip. We introduce a novel design methodology which facilitates design-for-EC and post-processing to enable EC with minimal perturbation. Initially, as a synthesis pre-processing step, the original design specification is augmented with additional design constraints which ensure flexibility for future correction. Upon alteration of the initial design, a novel post-processing technique achieves the desired functionality with a near-minimal perturbation of the initially optimized design. The key contribution we introduce is a constraint manipulation technique which enables reduction of an arbitrary EC problem into its corresponding classical synthesis problem. As a result, in both pre- and post-processing for EC, classical synthesis algorithms can be used to enable flexibility and perform the correction process. We demonstrate the developed EC methodology on a set of behavioral and system synthesis tasks