System Design Methodologies

In this chapter we will look at different design methodologies, or design flows, for multi-processor systems. Design methodologies have evolved together with manufacturing technology, design complexity, and design automation. Improvements in technology have increased design complexity to the point that designers are no longer capable of making complex designs manually. To solve this problem, design automation tools, also known as computer-aided design (CAD) tools, were introduced. In order to make CAD tools more efficient and design algorithms more manageable, design-automation researchers as well as tool developers were forced to introduce more stringent design rules, parameterize components and minimize component libraries. As design complexities continued to increase, tool developers created new design abstraction levels and tried to use the same design strategy from the circuit level, to the logic level, to the processor level, and finally to the system level.

In this chapter, we will explain some basic system design methodologies related to the different abstraction levels in the Y-chart we introduced in Chapter 1.