DATE 2007 "Best Industrial Designs" Session: From Algorithm to First 3.5G Call in Record Time - A Novel System Design Approach Based on Virtual Prototyping and its Consequences for Interdisciplinary System Design Teams

Increasing system complexity not only in wireless communications forces design teams to avoid errors during the process of system refinement thereby keeping ambiguities during system implementation at a minimum. On the other hand the chosen system design approach has to ensure that a system design project rapidly advances through all stages of refinement from an algorithmic model to a real "system on chip" (SoC) while maintaining backwards equivalence of the produced HW and FW/SW code with the original algorithmic model. This system design challenge also demands a new interdisciplinary team approach encompassing all design skills ranging from concept to HW and FW/SW engineering as well as system verification to increase the overlap in the system concept, implementation and verification phase. But how do these interdisciplinary teams cooperate efficiently, as they are used to metaphorically "speak different design languages"? Resulting in an industry record development time for a 3.5G UMTS modem the employment of a novel system design approach is shown which serves as common system design language, avoiding the babylonian language disaster of isolated engineering worlds. The motivation for an increasing overlap of system concept, implementation and verification phases is obvious: it can save time (to market) in the magnitude of several months or even more and thus drastically shorten design cycles by parallel development of HW and FW/SW. The proposed approach also helps to avoid costly redesign cycles due to conceptual errors and optimizes the quality of the developed system HW and FW/SW thereby also substantially reducing system development R&D costs