CoFluent Design - First time DAC exhibitor CoFluent Design helps designers bridge the gap from specification to implementation

First time DAC exhibitor CoFluent Design helps designers bridge the gap from specification to implementation
CoFluent Studio™ ESL toolset facilitates communications between all project stakeholders and enables designers to take the right decisions at the right time

80% of design decisions are taken in a project’s first 20%
It is an admitted fact that 80% of design decisions are taken in the first 20% of a project’s total development time. Further development of a system is mostly driven by those early decisions: making the right choices will make the difference between success and failure of a project. Major design errors often result from wrong decisions taken at the beginning of a project and are usually detected during its later phases, what heavily impacts its development cost and time.
However, designers rely on quite few data at the beginning of a project for carefully taking decisions. They usually start from imprecise customer’s requirements and/or incomplete system specifications and quickly decide on the system’s architecture, encompassing hardware, software and communications, mainly from approximate spreadsheet calculations and based on experience/expertise with reused or derived designs.
Today’s technological and economical environments leave no room for improvisation; developers may afford guessing, but they can’t afford failing.

Defining the path from specification to implementation
Globally, early design decisions can be classified into 2 categories:
Decisions relating to the functionality and time properties of the system
Decisions relating to the architecture and performances of the system
The first set of decisions consists in defining precisely the behavior of the system’s application (including its response times) under certain use cases/scenarios, and verifying & validating it against requirements.
The second set of decisions consists in defining the system’s hardware platform and the allocation of functions and communications to resources of that platform. Then, designers verify that the resulting system architecture (hardware platform + application-to-platform mapping/allocation) delivers the expected functional and non-functional requirements (reuse, time constraints, cost, power consumption, memory size, CPU usage, etc.).

Providing a common framework for translating specifications and preparing for implementation
One of the great challenges of electronic products design resides in the transition from an end-user perspective with typical natural language type of requirements, to an engineering perspective in need of precise and non-ambiguous specifications.
CoFluent Studio for Timed-Behavioral Modeling helps bridge the communications gap between decision makers (end-users/customers, marketing) and implementers (system, software, hardware engineering), including third-parties (contractors, IP providers). Using graphical notations independent of the platform that all parties feel comfortable with/can understand, specification and system engineers model and simulate the functionality and time properties of real-time HW/SW applications mixing data and control flows. Hence, engineers can deliver timed-executable specifications of the system for behavioral verification & validation purposes among all project stakeholders, ensuring that all functional and non-functional requirements are met.
In addition, with CoFluent Studio Real-Time Software Generation, software developers can directly generate the embedded application C code from previously defined graphical notations.

Taking architecture decisions with a high level of confidence on future implementation
Once the system’s functionality is agreed upon, the next challenge resides in making the right architecture choices very early on the project (80% of total decisions taken in a project’s first 20%).
CoFluent Studio for System Architecting helps obtaining necessary and sufficient data for taking the right architecture decisions at the right time. System architects graphically model an abstract model of the complete system by mapping the application to a defined platform for performance analysis purpose. High-level SystemC simulation allows short architecture exploration cycles and delivers precise-enough performance data projections. Hence, architects can deliver a virtual architecture of the system specifying the optimal system organization for the best cost/performances ratio.

Traditional ESL design or MDA®/MDD tools can’t help
Traditional Electronic System-Level (ESL) design tools usually provide results when projects are already at 70% or more of their development time as cycle-accurate hardware models and the almost completed software code need to be available, what takes time and money to obtain. At this stage, such tools can only deliver a confirmation of whether the taken design decisions were the right ones or not, but they don’t really help taking those high-level decisions early on the project.
Model-Driven Architecture®/Design (MDA/MDD) tools are still very immature at addressing mixed hardware/software systems and analyzing performance properties. They can’t really help with architecture-related decisions.

CoFluent Studio bridges the gap between specification and implementation
Modeling electronic systems with CoFluent Studio early on their project can help designers take the right decisions when it matters: before it’s too late.
CoFluent Studio is a system modeling & simulation toolset that facilitates communications between all project stakeholders and helps developers of embedded systems and chips take the right decisions for ensuring efficient implementation. Based on an intuitive system-level design methodology, CoFluent Studio enables designers to get an accurate global model of their hardware/software systems in a project’s first 20%, when 80% of decisions are taken. Early simulation delivers prospective information on how and how well the real system is expected to behave under defined use cases. Designers easily try different design choices and quickly find the optimal system architecture that will deliver the right functionality on the right platform for the best cost/performance ratio.
In the end, CoFluent Studio contributes to improving time-to-profitability by mitigating project delay and cancellation risks, optimizing the final product and improving productivity.

The CoFluent Studio toolset is already adopted and used by world-leading mobile phone manufacturers, telecommunication network equipment manufacturers and semiconductor providers.

CoFluent Design exhibits at DAC 2005 on booth # 1872.

About CoFluent Design

http://www.cofluentdesign.com
mailto:info@cofluentdesign.com

Contact

Vincent Perrier
Tel.: +33 240 683 246
mailto:vincent.perrier@cofluentdesign.com

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