Coherence: An Approach to Representing Ethnographic Analyses in Systems Design

Welcome to the DATE 08 Conference Proceedings. DATE combines the world's favourite electronic systems design conference and Europe's leading international exhibition for electronic design, automation and test, from system level hardware and software implementation right down to integrated circuit design. The DATE 08 event features a technical program with 77 sessions covering the latest developments in system design and embedded software, IC design/test methodologies and EDA tools, together with an exhibition with the leading EDA, silicon and IP providers showing their new products and services. Challenges that you all face or soon will face in your daily practice are the increasing design complexity of highly integrated systems, the introduction of reconfigurability and embedded software, and the control of power and variability in nanometer IC designs. All these issues will be addressed in this year's DATE event. For the 11th successive year DATE has prepared an exciting technical programme, with the help of the more than 400 members of the Technical Programme Committee, who dedicated their time to thoroughly review the 839 submissions in 37 topics, ranging from system level down to circuit design and covering all the most relevant application domains. The submissions are organised in 4 major areas: D --- Design Methods, Tools, Algorithms and Languages A --- Application Design T --- Test Methods, Tools and Innovative Experiences E --- Embedded Software After a thorough review and selection process (with an average of 5 reviews per paper), finally 198 regular papers were selected for presentation at the conference. Additionally, there are 46 Interactive Presentations that are organised in 5 IP sessions. Together with the invited special sessions (panels, embedded tutorials and hot topic sessions), this has resulted in a high-quality technical program. The technical program provides a wide but high-quality coverage of design, design automation and test topics, from the system level to the integrated circuit level. Compared with previous years, submissions in the Embedded Software track has increased by 50%, showing a clear trend towards a comprehensive system design focus with integrated hardware and software solutions. DATE has established itself firmly as a true Electronic System Design Conference. This year the conference is held in Germany, at the ICM in Munich and spans an entire working week from Monday March 10 to Friday March 14. On Monday, eleven pre-conference tutorials will be given. The three-full day tutorials cover topics of great interest for system design. The first tutorial deals with techniques to automatically realising embedded system from high-level functional models. The second tutorial addresses the different issues related to communication based design and architectures in automotive electronic systems. The third tutorial discusses several key concepts on system-level design and application mapping for wireless and multimedia MPSoC architectures. Furthermore, eight half-day tutorials are also given, which cover a wide spectrum of topics on specification, modelling, design and test. The main conference opens on Tuesday March 11, with two very interesting and complementary keynote speeches. Dominique Vernay, Chief Technical Officer for Thales, will talk about the challenges of embedded systems design, and Giovanni de Micheli, Professor at EPFL, will present his views on designing micro/nano systems for a safer and healthier tomorrow. On the same day, the Executive Track offers a series of business panels with executives discussing hot topics in design: the perils of 45 nanometers, the changes in EDA strategies from IDM, to fablite to fabless, and embedded systems level design strategies. DATE 08 will again offer two specific days related to special themes. On Wednesday March 12, a special full-day track is devoted to Automotive Electronics---Software and Architecture. This special-day track will focus on the challenges faced by the automotive supply chain with particular attention to system and software architecture design. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of automotive architectures, including ECUs, sensors and communication standards and discusses how new methods, tools and standards for interoperability and component-based design can deal with the increasing complexity of software systems and their need for reliability and guaranteed timely behaviour. In addition, it addresses to what degree existing standards, including AUTOSAR and FLEXRAY and model-based development, can support the development of safety and time-critical software. On Thursday March 13, a second special full-day track focuses on Dependable Embedded Systems. This track will address both conceptual and applied issues for design, analysis and validation of dependable embedded systems. The utility of embedded systems and services is based, in large part, on our depending on their sustained functionality in spite of the encountered operational or malicious disruptions. As the number of transient and also permanent disruptions (given the decreasing device geometries, higher device density, lower voltage latching, faster clocks etc) is expected to increase substantially, this will not only be a key issue for the hardware community but also the systems community in general. Solutions using a combination of hardware and software might be more effective than hardware-only or software-only solutions. This track focuses on both conceptual and applied issues for design, analysis and validation of dependable embedded systems. Besides these special tracks, the main conference is organized in six parallel tracks of sessions, three devoted to design methods, tools, algorithms and languages, one to application design, one to test methods, tools and innovative experiences, and finally one to embedded software. The presentations of the selected regular papers in these parallel tracks are complemented by nine Special Sessions and two Invited Industrial Sessions. The special sessions are organized in the form of panels, hot topics, and embedded tutorials. The topics to be covered include quantitative evaluation for embedded systems design, design and manufacturing at 32 and 22nm, software for wireless networked embedded systems, test challenges for low power devices, quantitative productivity measurement in IC design, and 3D Integration. The two invited industrial sessions deal with industrial system designs in transportation and information technologies. To emphasise that DATE is the major event for the designers, DATE 08 features also invited sessions where Europe's famous consumer industry presents their best designs and design practices. Friday March 14 is the day for the DATE workshops. DATE 08 offers workshops on current and emerging important issues in design, test, EDA and software to complement the regular conference. They provide a unique opportunity for the various research and design communities to spend a day discussing the latest and the best, sharing their experiences and visions. This year's workshop program includes eight workshop themes. Four workshops are related to software engineering, ranging from dependable software to modelling, analysis and development tools. Four other workshop themes cover a variety of topics such as the impact of process variations on design and test, the merging world of Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems, new directions in high level synthesis, and heterogeneous reconfigurable hardware. Each workshop features presentations, invited or submitted, from highly distinguished academic and industrial researchers. Finally, throughout the conference days, DATE offers a comprehensive overview of commercial design and verification tools in its large exhibition hall. Exhibitors include EDA vendors, silicon, FPGA and IP providers showing their new products and services. In addition, there is an Exhibition Theatre featuring talks from engineering managers of the leading electronic manufacturers on first-hand design experiences of commercial EDA tools. New this year is the European projects village where different European and large government funded projects will be able to show their ongoing research and results to the design community and have the opportunity for internal meetings and discussions. The DATE week will be also an opportunity for students and universities to show their research work, through the PhD Forum on Monday evening and the University Booth where hardware and software demonstrations will be shown by different universities on a rotation schedule. The DATE 08 event's program will be particularly attractive to industrial designers, at analog, IC, FPGA and embedded system level, as well as software designers, to researchers and academics as well as to design managers, and an increasing attendance is expected. We therefore invite you to take full advantage of the many opportunities offered to you by DATE 08, to extend your knowledge and/or business in electronic system's design and to exploit the abundant networking possibilities offered to socialise with colleagues, including fringe meetings and a memorable social party with bands and dancing. We hope that you will all enjoy the DATE 08 Conference and Exhibition.

Technical system design processes are typically based on systems engineering vee models where designers move between functional and physical domains as they develop detailed designs of the overall system and its sub-systems and component parts. The movements between the functional and physical domains are informed by the core activities of any design process: synthesis, description, analysis and simulation, and decision-making. However, delivering socio-technical systems design mindsets, such as those needed to design multi-team systems, requires a new branch of systems science that integrates human behavior into system behavior. Design processes built on such a science would allow system designers to compare alternative solutions in terms of their anticipated performance and consider different options with respect to functions carried out by humans and machines. In this chapter we use a systems design process vee model and apply it to a case study that involves the design of a multi-team customer service system. Both the application of the vee model (i.e., the proposed design process) and the results of its application (i.e., the multi-team customer service system) can be regarded as socio-technical systems and are used to illustrate and elaborate on Clegg’s (Appl Ergon 31(5):463–477, 2000) socio-technical principles for system design. On this basis, we provide a practical framework for designing socio-technical systems and identify requirements for developing future methods and tools to support this process.

Purpose: This study aims to design the flow of the e-budgeting system to develop the village financial system, as well as to increase transparency and accountability of the web-based budget system and minimize the occurrence of corruption loopholes in the village. Method: The design system uses the waterfall method to analyze a model systematically. The model development step starts with the design of the system, database, menu structure, and interface. The design of the e-budget information system is built using PHP and MySQL programming in the form of web-based applications. Results: This study developed a web-based e-budgeting application using the waterfall method to manage village finances. The online system increases flexibility, allowing access from any device. It runs smoothly on computers, with all menus functioning as designed, and is expected to simplify village financial management. Limitations: The researchers’ capability in designing the system is not optimal, as the researchers do not have the basis of informatics engineering, so the results obtained and delivered are not too detailed. Contributions: This system is expected to be useful to facilitate the process of financial management at the village government level. Novelty: The novelty of this study lies in the design of a village e-budgeting system with features like automatic Standard Unit Price calculation, automated tax management, and tracking of village income (PADes) for transparency. This application aims to enhance financial management, ensuring transparency and accountability in the village.

The integration of ‘‘real options’’ analysis will radically change the design of public and private systems. It will change the processes of system design, the way planners deal with uncertainly and risk. It will also change the outcomes, the kinds of elements designers build into the system as they develop it. This paper explains this coming evolution, and presents cases documenting the changes in attitude and the results already occurring. To think in terms of options alters the way one deals with uncertainty. Conventionally, good design minimizes risk. It focuses on increasing reliability and making the best decisions in risky situations. In short, it is reactive to risk. The framework of options thinking, however, recognizes that uncertainty adds value to options. In this context, uncertainty is a driver of value and can be viewed as a positive element. Correspondingly, systems design from this perspective is proactive towards risk. It seeks out opportunities to add value and commits to ongoing processes of information gathering to ensure that options can be exploited at the correct time. Thinking in terms of real options leads designers to build much more flexibility into a system than is common in current practice. For example, they may build duplicate combustion facilities that allow a plant to burn both natural gas and oil, or deliberately develop products that they may never launch. These investments that may be unused are ‘‘options’’; they give the system managers the capability to change the design or product mix, without requiring them to do so. The analysis of real options involves a set of procedures that adapt and extend the options analysis that won a Nobel in economics for its developers. Options analysis is now widely used for contracts on all kinds of widely traded financial instruments (stocks and bonds), commodities (oil, grain, and foreign exchange) and services (electric power, communications bandwidth). The analysis of real options applies the same basic principles, but adapts them to the particular circumstances of systems design, which generally deals with unique projects that lack historical statistics on risk. The analysis of real options enables managers and designers to estimate the value of system flexibility. As this has not been practical before, designers have previously not considered the value of flexibility. Incorporating this capability into systems analyses adds two significant dimensions to design. Public and private operators of major systems will come to recognize: - Large classes of projects as much more valuable than they now seem to be – these include all those that enable further development without committing to it prematurely, such as research, product development, system modularity, exploratory mining, etc.; and - New classes of design alternatives, specifically those enabling managers to adjust the system as needed when relevant information becomes available, that is design alternatives that involve deferral, acceleration and closure of facilities. The paper illustrates the wide range of applications of for the analysis of real options, using documented cases in many fields of engineering. It also refers to the extent possible to companies changing their procedures for system design and management to capitalize on the promise of real options.

The Design of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware Systems

The ‘top‐down’ system design process of functional decomposition is increasingly being criticised as simplistic, outmoded, and (in particular) too ‘reductionist’. Its use on large, complex systems is frequently portrayed as naive and impractical. There is much comment on the need to concentrate, instead, on the ‘emergent behaviours’ of systems, and to adopt a ‘holistic’ design approach in which a system solution is ‘evolved’ through a process of system design synthesis.This paper presents a counter‐argument that top‐down design decomposition can, in fact, be a highly efficient way to produce good (optimal) system solutions .Many of the fundamentals of function based system design are addressed: the central role of system function in the design process; the characterisation of system complexity and complication; the identification and specification of component requirements; and the determination of optimal design solutions.An established mathematical theory of systems design, using formal constructs and set‐theory notation, is used as the basis for the presentation of ideas.

This book will help readers gain a solid understanding of non-functional requirements inherent in systems design endeavors. It contains essential information for those who design, use, and maintain complex engineered systems, including experienced designers, teachers of design, system stakeholders, and practicing engineers. Coverage approaches non-functional requirements in a novel way by presenting a framework of four systems concerns into which the 27 major non-functional requirements fall: sustainment, design, adaptation, and viability. Within this model, the text proceeds to define each non-functional requirement, to specify how each is treated as an element of the system design process, and to develop an associated metric for their evaluation. Systems are designed to meet specific functional needs. Because non-functional requirements are not directly related to tasks that satisfy these proposed needs, designers and stakeholders often fail to recognize the importance of such attributes as availability, survivability, and robustness. This book gives readers the tools and knowledge they need to both recognize the importance of these non-functional requirements and incorporate them in the design process

The management of software development for single and dual processor system designs is making progress towards becoming a mature discipline. A good part of the progress can be attributed to the development and use of standard system and software engineering methods and design principles.However, new computer system designs (networking, distributed systems, embedded systems, multi- and coprocessors, fault tolerant systems, etc.) will create new challenges for managers of software development. The reason for this effect on management is that some of the system and software engineering methods and design principles developed for single and dual processor system designs are not valid for these newer designs.Some of the issues that software development project managers will need to cope with are:1. Life cycle model adjustments2. Rapid prototyping activities3. Different hardware and software phasing4. Increased tool development5. New trade-offs and hybrid developments of off-the-shelf software and newly developed software6. Development of concurrent design principles7. New software design principles to support fault tolerance and the use of new memory technologiesThe above items are just now being recognized as problems, and solutions for them either do not exist, or are not widely known.These problems create a series of new challenges that managers must deal with for software development based on the new architectures and requirements. The purposes of this paper are to discuss these issues and to identify some solutions that can serve in the interim as the technology changes to meet these new challenges.

Increasing complexity of mechatronic products leads to more challenging designs. As the most important stage, system design determines the overall product architecture. Defects in this stage are difficult to rectify in future stages, thus requiring greater model accuracy. With the development of model‐based systems engineering (MBSE), model verification can detect design defects, reduce development costs, improve development efficiency, and ensure system reliability. Currently, conventional verifications are performed only after design processes, which makes it difficult to make systematic modifications. To solve this problem, a model verification method implemented in the design stage is proposed in this study. Using this method, designers are able to detect defects earlier, thereby reducing modification costs. The proposed method is as follows: first, a language named Relation‐based Modeling for Static Properties (RMSP) is proposed to formalize the static properties of requirements; second, the representation of “Conceptual Graphs” is extended to meet the needs of model verification of mechatronic products; finally, requirements in RMSP and system design in Systems Modeling Language (SysML) are transformed into the Extension of Conceptual Graphs. In this manner, the incorrectness and inconsistencies between requirements and system design can be found through projection in the system design stage. The omitted or improperly designed requirement items would be found and redesigned to fulfill the product requirements.

This article frames the requirements definition phase of systems design as a problem of knowledge transfer and learning between two communities of practice: IS designers and system users. The theoretical basis for the proposed approach is Wenger’s (1998) framework for social learning, which involves three dimensions: alignment, imagination, and engagement. The article treats the requirements definition task in systems design as a set of activities involving mutual learning and knowledge transfer between two communities of practice (CoP) along these three dimensions. In taking this approach, the article maps the results of past research on the systems design process onto this CoP framework and illustrates that the proposed framework encompasses the same activities used by traditional methods of requirements definition. However, this approach focuses attention on the learning that must take place between the two CoPs and thereby helps resolve some of the inherent shortcomings of prior efforts and approaches. The framework provides both a more encompassing conceptual lens for research on improving the requirements definition task and practical guidance for managers who are charged with a systems design project.

Electric drive systems consisting of battery, inverter, electric motor and gearbox are applied in hybridor purely electric vehicles. The layout process of such propulsion systems is performed on system level under consideration of various component properties and their interfering characteristics. In addition, different boundary conditions are taken under account, e. g. performance, efficiency, packaging, costs. In this way, the development process of the power train involves a broad range of influencing parameters and periphery conditions and thus represents a multi-dimensional optimization problem. Stateof-the-art development processes of mechatronic systems are usually executed according to the V-model, which represents a fundamental basis for handling the complex interactions of the different disciplines involved. In addition, stage-gate processes and spiral models are applied to deal with the high level of complexity during conception, design and testing. Involving a large number of technical and economic factors, these sequential, recursive processes may lead to suboptimal solutions since the system design processes do not sufficiently consider the complex relations between the different, partially conflicting domains. In this context, the present publication introduces an integrated multi-objective optimization strategy for the effective conception of electric propulsion systems, which involves a holistic consideration of all components and requirements in a multi-objective manner. The system design synthesis is based on component-specific Pareto-optimal designs to handle performance, efficiency, package and costs for given system requirements. The results are displayed as Pareto-fronts of electric power train system designs variants, from which decision makers are able to choose the best suitable solution. In this way, the presented system design approach for the development of electrically driven axles enables a multi-objective optimization considering efficiency, performance, costs and package. It is capable to reduce development time and to improve overall system quality at the same time.

Model‐Based Systems Design (MBSD) formalizes the application of system modeling. However, it is still difficult for designers to implement MBSD in practice. One of the challenges is to make the field of design more unified, as different MBSD methodologies focus on specific areas, and various designers from different areas use ambiguous terms. Moreover, the failure of some products originates in undiscovered couplings of functions in the design stage. Axiomatic Design (AD) provides a scientific foundation for system design. In order to reduce ambiguity and alleviate functional couplings, this paper integrates AD with the MBSD and proposes a unified systems design approach, called Axiomatic Model‐Based Systems Design (A‐MBSD). A‐MBSD uses four pillars: (a) the fundamental framework of AD; (b) the Independence Axiom; (c) a new behavior domain (BD); and (d) an A‐MBSD modeling profile. Finally, the design of a Forest Fire Satellite Monitoring and Control System demonstrates that the proposed approach can improve unity and alleviate the coupling of functions in a system design.

With the latest gaming systems such as X-box, Playstation 3, PSP, IPTV, and H264 requiring more bandwidth, packaged in smaller devices, and providing higher quality, in return they evacuate more heat and consume more power, thus making power consumption and thermal dissipation a major issue for chip designers in the nanometer era.Thermal effects on the chip and package is the next wave. First, there was signal integrity. Then power integrity and now, there is a new first-order effect in the horizon for IC and system designers called thermal integrity. And the traditional design methodology of using uniform temperature across the chip is becoming woefully inadequate and provides insufficient data to the package and system designers, unable to meet the requirement and demands of the consumer. To better understand the impact of temperature variation on chip's performance, both power distribution and package characteristics must be considered in the design and analysis flow. Likewise, a realistic view of the heat distribution across the chip is becoming essential for package and system designers. What makes the analysis of signal, power, and thermal integrity effects challenging is that they must all be considered concurrently across the entire chip, which requires novel approaches to mitigate the issue.The panel will discuss how urgent is the impact of thermal integrity on system designs and is this a real concern or are we making it up?When and under what condition will it become urgent, and is it related to process nodes, low power applications, type of packaging used, etc.? Is there specific design techniques used for more specific multimedia processing? Can you separate the IC design from package and system designs with some assumptions or is co-design the only way? How accurate is the industry's understanding of the physics of the chip (device), interconnect, and package? Is thermal integrity a first order or second order effect?Given the other variations from nominal, how important is this.The moderator will conclude with a summary of the panelist comments and be able to make a forward-looking statement about the future of power and heat and their impact on system design.

Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems design utilize a sequential procedure that focuses on production capacity requirements, with human operator task design developed late in the systems design phase. Implementing manufacturing systems in this way is difficult when operations management must design flexible and efficient processes, with an often incomplete understanding of how people can best perform within the system. This study developed an integrated methodology that uses both manual and computer simulations to evaluate system performance and ergonomic issues early in the system design process. Information about operator performance and ergonomics is obtained in the manual simulations, while estimates of operator utilization and system throughput is obtained through computer simulations. An iterative design process is used, with the results of manual and computer simulations informing each other during subsequent simulations. An industrial case study is presented here to demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology. The results show that the methodology can be used to design manufacturing systems with significant savings in labor cost and improved manufacturing system flexibility. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 13: 19–40, 2003.

Computer system design addresses the optimization of metrics such as cost, performance, power, and reliability in the presence of physical constraints. The advent of large area, low cost Multi-Chip Modules (MCM) will lead to a new class of optimal system designs. This paper explores the early analysis of the impact of packaging technology on this design process. Our goal is to develop a suite of tools to evaluate computing system architectures under the constraints of various technologies. The design of the memory hierarchy in high speed microprocessors is used to explore the nature and type of trade-offs that can be made during the conceptual design of computing systems.