Designing system on a chip products using systems engineering tools

Systems engineering is the process which takes requirements specifications and engineers products and product families which involved hardware, software and possibly mechanical subsystems. At the front-end of this process architectural assessment and early quantification is a requirement-answering the what-if questions about the candidate architectures of a product. At the back-end, verification and realization of the selected architecture occurs. Tools to support systems engineering encompass architectural assessment, co-design and co-verification and feed into the synthesis and realization tools flow. Systems on silicon products are reliant on systems engineering tools to enable the concurrent design of hardware and software and their modeling and verification prior to realization. This paper describes the systems engineering process and the requirements for tools support.