Virtual component co-design-applying function architecture co-design to automotive applications

System design is moving from a trial-and-error manual process towards a more rigorous and tool-supported approach. The driving function for this move is the need to develop new products quickly, correctly and inexpensively. Time-to-market of four to six months are not uncommon today for some electronic systems. At the same time, there is a need to leverage maximally what deep sub-micron (DSM) technology has to offer to compete. Hence, an approach that has design re-use as its main goal has great potential to increase productivity of the industry as a whole. The basic tenets of the design methodology have been incorporated into the Cadence VCC environment for virtual component co-design. They are function-architecture co-design, mapping of functions to flexible and programmable architectures, and efficient and automatic implementation of actual code on the programmable components of the architecture. This paper illustrates these principles using the automotive applications as an example. Besides the different steps of the actual function architecture codesign methodology, the authors show and summarize the lessons learned from design projects. They outline how it has been possible to capture functions and candidate architectures and how the mapping of the functions to the candidate architectures can be carried out very quickly so as to converge to an "optimal" solution effectively and in a few iterations.