Supporting hardware trade analysis and cost estimation using design complexity

Defines and illustrates a hardware design complexity measure (HDCM) and describe its potential applications to trade-off analysis and cost estimation. Specifically, we define a VHDL complexity measure. We have derived the HDCM from an avionics software design complexity measure (ASDCM) that we have shown to be effective in estimation and optimization of overall software costs. Similar to the ASDCM, we believe that the proposed HDCM could enable more optimal hardware design, implementation and maintenance.