Model-based hardware design

Ever shrinking design cycles, ever increasing design complexities, ever changing design standards, high NRE and design re-spin costs are a few of the major challenges in system-level design. In such an design environment, clock frequency, silicon footprint and power profile are no longer the sole design considerations. To this, we would have to add re-usability, platform re-targetability, testability, verifiability, standards compliance check-ability and design cycle time as first-order constraints. This paper presents model-based hardware design to address these challenges. It is a design methodology that bridges the world of system designers, software programmers, hardware engineers and verification engineers to increase productivity and produce correct-by-construction designs that match the system specification. We describe the various components of the methodology and present hard evidence of the realization of these ideals as cited by several real world case studies. In almost all cases, designers cite massive shrinkage of their design cycle time without sacrificing design quality.