A Formal Approach to Managing Design Processes

To capture market opportunities, competition within the microelectronics industry demands ever-faster product development, which means ever-shorter design cycles. Shorter design cycles can be achieved by carefully managing the design process during rapid prototyping. Traditionally, designers have used whatever tools were convenient at the time. This practice has resulted in steps being skipped and designs not being checked for important criteria until it's too late to make changes. These problems can be avoided through design methodology management, which ensures that appropriate tools are selected and executed in the appropriate sequence. The authors propose a maintainable, flexible methodology management system that supports parallel execution of methodologies. Although initially developed for digital hardware synthesis, this system can also apply to such domains as software development. The prototype is based on process flow graphs and design process grammars. The graphs describe the information flow of a design process, while the grammars transform high-level process flow graphs into progressively more detailed ones. The designer interacts with a Unix program called Cockpit, which tracks process flow graphs and informs the designer of possible actions. Process flow graphs are developed in a top-down manner by applying a set of substitution rules to nodes that represent abstract tasks. New tools and processes can easily be integrated into the framework.