Chapter 2 - The Design and Verification Process

Complex systems on chip (SoCs) present challenges in the design and verification process that cannot be adequately addressed by traditional methodologies based on register transfer descriptions. Some of the aspects are efficient design exploration based on component reuse, getting closure on the architecture, as well as early development, integration and verification of embedded software. In search for responses to these challenges, Transaction level modeling (TLM) has got quite some attention in the area of SoC design. This panel attempts to do a reality check on TLM from an engineering point of view. Questions to discuss are: Is the Transaction Level (TL) really useful for the design and/or for the verification of SoCs? How can TL speed up the design process and lowering the risk of design failures? What are the implications on tools, languages, and Intellectual Property (IP) used in the design/verification process? The panelists will share their thoughts on transaction based design and verification, and will discuss benefits and issues based on their experiences of applying transaction level methodologies.

With the ever increasing complexity of today's IC packaging designs and new packaging technologies of tomorrow, coupled with the increasingly global nature of design and manufacturing / assembly, traditional 2-D EDA packaging tools and design collaboration capabilities do not have the required feature subsets nor controlled and seamless design sharing integration needed to support 3-D design technologies. These current solutions cannot adequately meet advanced packaging's current and future needs. New generation 3-D EDA tools and design collaboration systems that integrate 3-D design and global data collaboration are required to meet these expanding technologies. The conventional 2-D IC package design process flow begins with top-down design and layout, and utilize software tools that only have the ability to verify 2-D design rule checks (DRC). These limited rules, while sufficient for lead frame, single tier Ball Grid Array (BGA), and other single level package types, do not take into consideration advanced System in Package (SiP) stacked die configurations with multi-die advanced bond wire and other connection technologies with accompanying manufacturing variables and tolerances. The lack of tools that accurately model these 3-D manufacturing parameters result in substantial trial and error in the assembly set up process, increasingly poor yields as complexity increases, and in some cases, eventual package / substrate redesign after costly time and resources in manufacturing have already been expended. In addition, the design and manufacturing and assembly departments tend to be organizationally as well as geographically separated with little or no real data transfer or feedback between the departments. The result is evident in current package designs that are completed according to basic rules without the benefit of, nor the ability to incorporate optimal manufacturing data. These designs are completed “successfully” (from a 2-D design standpoint) and then sent to manufacturing and assembly. These “successful” designs are then evaluated from a manufacturing and assembly viewpoint, and real world manufacturing parameters are utilized to “redesign” the assembly of the package to attempt to make the package manufacturable. The optimization of the design for manufacturing can take days or weeks to accomplish through a long process of trial and error. Many iterations of the assembly prototype are made until it is deemed manufacturable, or if not, the design is sent back to the design department for re-design. In order to increase reliability, increase yields, and decrease time to market for advanced SiP and other stacked technologies, a 3-D design collaboration system is required to integrate the design, verification, manufacturing, and assembly processes into a seamless system that is globally accessible in real time by all departments. This system must provide data access to the designer from all related departments, including engineering, simulation, manufacturing, assembly, etc. in order for the designer to be able to optimize the design for maximum performance as well as the highest yield and shortest time-to-market. This system will accurately verify 3-D assembly parameters during the design process. Manufacturing, engineering, and assembly departments will be able to input manufacturing parameters into the design, thereby eliminating much of the trial and error prone in the package design and assembly process today, and the design can be shared by multiple users and departments for true collaboration. This paper explains the role and manufacturing benefits of a 3-D package design and global data collaboration system.

Modeling and Simulation (M&S) has been a key contributor to the validation of key system concepts, trade-off analysis, and dimensioning of the system performance before it could be realized in cost effective and timely manner. Leading system developers harness M&S capabilities for competitive advantage and operational/business efficiency by leveraging advances in VLSI technologies (processing horse power, memory, storage, high throughput buses), graphics, display, and networking technologies and its utility spans not only across concept development, and trade-off analysis but also in system design, test and evaluation, failure analysis, and, to some extent, identifying production issues.

This paper illustrates an approach for architectural design of a Learning Management System (LMS), which is verifiable against the Learning Technology System Architecture (LTSA) conformance rules. We introduce a new method for software architectural design that extends the Unified Modeling Language (UML) component diagram with the formal architectural style of Acme, hence, combines the advantages of the visual appeal of a graphical method and preciseness of a formal method. We propose some new stereotypes for UML component-connector style to incorporate Acme style within UML. A UML meta-model for the design components is also proposed to elucidate the relationships between the components. We also propose a verification method to ensure that the design artifact is holding conformance with LTSA standard. The design process as well as the verification process entails additional knowledge about the domain, which is supplied by the domain Ontology. The LTSA conformance rules, written in natural language, are represented more formally with help of Conceptual Graph representation, before using them in the verification process. Finally, we introduce a verification method that tries to find out a design pattern in the architectural design that conforms to the particular conformance rule intended to check. The verification process also introduces a goodness measure of the conformance.

Sanctioned trauma center designation began in the late 1970's to improve hospital capabilities to care for injured patients. Guided by criteria established by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma and led by surgeons dedicated to improving trauma care, many states focused early on the quality of care issue only to later struggle with the political consequences that followed the designation process. Institutional commitment to trauma care was often stated but seldom measured. Unlike the designation process with its strong emphasis on capabilities assessment, the verification process focused on performance documentation. Confirmation was sought in response time of key personnel, completeness of registry database, and trauma death audits. Trauma Committee minutes were reviewed and prehospital personnel interviewed to confirm institutional involvement in paramedic education and overall EMS system design. Other areas of documentation included trauma education at all levels, research, nursing audits, and outreach programs. We conclude that trauma center designation and verification are both essential and complementary. Effective trauma system performance requires trauma center designation plus a verification process to confirm institutional commitment of these resources for optimal care of the injured patient.

This paper presents a framework and detailed vision for using immersive virtual reality (VR) environments to improve the design, verification, validation, and manufacture of medical devices. Major advances in medical device design and manufacture currently require extensive and expensive product cycles that include animal and clinical trials. The current design process limits opportunities to thoroughly understand and refine current designs and to explore new high-risk, high-payoff designs. For the past 4 years, our interdisciplinary research group has been working toward developing strategies to dramatically increase the role of simulation in medical device engineering, including linking simulations with visualization and interactive design. Although this vision aligns nicely with the stated goals of the FDA and the increasingly important role that simulation plays in engineering, manufacturing, and science today, the interdisciplinary expertise needed to realize a simulation-based visual design environment for real-world medical device design problems makes implementing (and even generating a system-level design for) such a system extremely challenging. In this paper, we present our vision for a new process of simulation-based medical device engineering and the impact it can have within the field. We also present our experiences developing the initial components of a framework to realize this vision and applying them to improve the design of replacement mechanical heart valves. Relative to commercial software packages and other systems used in engineering research, the vision and framework described are unique in the combined emphasis on 3D user interfaces, ensemble visualization, and incorporating state-of-the-art custom computational fluid dynamics codes. We believe that this holistic conception of simulation-based engineering, including abilities to not just simulate with unprecedented accuracy but also to visualize and interact with simulation results, is critical to making simulation-based engineering practical as a tool for major innovation in medical devices. Beyond the medical device arena, the framework and strategies described may well generalize to simulation-based engineering processes in other domains that also involve simulating, visualizing, and interacting with data that describe spatially complex time-varying phenomena.

Effective evaluation of capacitances of interconnections is indispensable for verification and simulation procedures in IC's design process. In our previous works we have proposed improved analytical formulas taking into account interactions between subregions of the structure. In this paper an analysis of accuracy of the procedure of conducting lines capacitance evaluation in the case of buses crossing in different layers has been performed in order to provide universal and verified tool for designers. Basing on computational experiments a formula allowing prediction of the error in the case of various values of geometric dimensions of the structure has been derived.

This paper describes a case study in refining an abstract security protocol description down to a concrete implementation on a Java Card smart card. The aim is to consider the decisions that have to be made in the development of such an implementation in a systematic way, and to investigate the possibilities of formal specification and verification in the design process and for the final implementation.

By means of Ramadge–Wonham supervisory control theory, supervisory controllers (supervisors) can be synthesized instead of designing them manually. This chapter presents an application of supervisory control to a patient support system for MRI scanners. The design process of the controller from its requirements to its actual implementation on real hardware has been done according to the synthesis-based engineering paradigm. This paradigm integrates the model-based engineering and supervisory control paradigms. The design process is supported by a tool framework that is based on the Compositional Interchange Format for hybrid systems (CIF). An experiment conducted in the course of the case-study indicates that this design process improves the evolvability of the controller significantly.

Transaction level modeling (TLM) and component based software development approaches accelerate the process of an embedded system design and simulation and hence improve the overall productivity. On the other hand, system level design languages facilitate the fast hardware synthesis at behavioral level of abstraction. In this paper, we introduce an approach for hardware/software codesign of image processing application that uses TLM and component based software design approaches along with HW synthesis using SystemC to accelerate system design and verification process. Our experiments performed over an image processing application shows the effectiveness of our methodology.

Several studies have discussed the limitations of the available CAAD tools and have proposed solutions [Brown and Novitski 1987, Brown 1990, Degelman and Kim 1988, Schuman et al 1988]. The lack of integration between the different tasks that these programs address and the design process is a major problem. Schuman et al [1988] argued that in architectural design many issues must be considered simultaneously before the synthesis of a final product can take place. Studies by Brown and Novitski [1987] and Brown [1990] discussed the difficulties involved with integrating technical considerations in the creative architectural process. One aspect of the problem is the neglect of technical factors during the initial phase of the design that, as the authors argued, results from changing the work environment and the laborious nature of the design process. Many of the current programs require the user to input a great deal of numerical values that are needed for the energy analysis. Although there are some programs that attempt to assist the user by setting default values, these programs distract the user with their extensive arrays of data. The appropriate design tool is the one that helps the user to easily view the principal components of the building design and specify their behaviors and interactions. Data abstraction and information parsimony are the key concepts in developing a successful design tool. Three different approaches for developing an appropriate CAAD tool were found in the literature. Although there are several similarities among them, each is unique in solving certain aspects of the problem. Brown and Novitski [1987] emphasize the learning factor of the tool as well as its highly graphical user interface. Degelman and Kim [1988] emphasize knowledge acquisition and the provision of simulation modules. The Windows and Daylighting Group of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) emphasizes the dynamic structuring of information, the intelligent linking of data, the integrity of the different issues of design and the design process, and the extensive use of images [Schuman et al 19881, these attributes incidentally define the word hypermedia. The LBL model, which uses hypermedia, seems to be the more promising direction for this type of research. However, there is still a need to establish a new model that integrates all aspects of the problem. The areas in which the present research departs from the LBL model can be listed as follows: it acknowledges the necessity of regarding the user as the center of the CAAD tool design, it develops a model that is based on one of the high level theories of human-computer interaction, and it develops a prototype tool that conforms to the model.

Safety assurance remains paramount for the realization of autonomous vessels. A robust assurance methodology that can provide traceability throughout the design and verification process is necessary to demonstrate safety equivalence to that of conventional ships. However, there are few references that propose a holistic safety assurance scheme for autonomous ships, using actual engineering processes of ships as examples. This study proposes a design and development method for an autonomous navigation system that integrates Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and several verification methods including simulation-based tests to develop a comprehensive safety assurance scheme. This safety assurance scheme is being conducted as a case study for a newly constructed autonomous vessel. First, STPA can be performed on the conceptual design established by MBSE to extract additional safety requirements from the identified loss scenarios. Focusing on the process model in the loss scenario description leads to a deeper understanding of the system behavior. FMEA in addition identify potential component failure modes and their impact on system safety. The multi-level requirements that emerge from these activities are validated in test scenarios. Simulators are used to evaluate whether the autonomous navigation system’s safety can meet predefined pass criteria in some of the scenarios. These activities ensure traceability from safety goals to design decisions, allowing design changes and their impact on safety to be evaluated throughout the development lifecycle and allowing for more systematic ongoing monitoring during operations.

Since the beginning of aviation history, flutter was recognized as a catastrophic event for an aircraft, consequence of a dynamic instability when speed is too high, due to the interaction between the aeroelastic forces acting on wing and tail and their dynamic characteristics. With the progress of aircraft design, aircraft speed increased and the consolidation of the monoplane configuration led to a lower torsional stiffness of wings than biplanes. The consequence was that flutter became a serious problem, as demonstrated by the series of accidents usually accompanied by the destruction of the machine. It was evident the necessity was to develop theories and methodologies able to predict the phenomenon and to validate the design for the maximum speed to be achieved. This development is still continuing and has provided the modern aeronautical engineer with very powerful tools but still not sufficient to exclude specific flight trials aimed to confirm the prediction of aircraft speed margins before flutter. This chapter has been intended to explain flutter to an audience with limited knowledge on aeronautics and to present the design and verification processes followed by engineers to produce aircraft that, accordingly to aeronautical regulations, are free from flutter within their flight envelope.

Industry 5.0 places growing emphasis on intelligent and efficient design methodologies aiming to reduce development times, accelerate the time-to-market, and enhance human–machine collaboration in creating new products. This article proposes the use of a model-based design (MBD) approach to developing a detailed electro-thermal model (ETDM) of a Smart Latch Mechanism (SLM) used in automotive door automation systems. The proposed ETDM enhances the accuracy of the design and verification processes and enables the simulation of specific scenarios, such as fault conditions, within a virtual environment. The simulation-based framework presented in this article leverages partial knowledge of the system to enable rapid estimations of the performance and functional validation. It encompasses the injection of disturbances, the analysis of failure scenarios, and the use of processor-in-the-loop (PIL) procedures for validation purposes. This work aims to employ detailed modeling and simulation techniques and use publicly available technical data and work from the literature to eliminate the need for physical testing and instrumentation, enabling the development of models that accurately reflect the real-world behavior under defined operating conditions. The proposed framework has the potential to facilitate rapid prototyping and system reconfiguration, contributing to shorter development cycles and improved industrial efficiency by reducing both production times and the associated costs for established automotive subsystems where high precision is nonessential.

The LRCTF (Laser Ranging Characterization and Test Facility) is a unique facility built at NASA GSFC to provide thermal-optical testing of the next generation GPS LRA (Global Positioning Satellite’s Laser Retroreflector Array) laser ranging target. The 400mm diameter target is an array consisting of 48 total internal reflection retroreflectors and has an optical cross section requirement of 100 MSM (million square meters). To verify that the array meets this requirement during on-orbit conditions, the LRCTF is equipped with a 400mm test beam, a data product output consisting of full aperture FFDPs (Far Field Diffraction Patterns) and a thermal chamber. The FFDPs are used to calculate the OCS. This paper will describe the facility design, alignment approach, and verification process.