Slide 37 of 46
Notes:
An essential ingredient in any such approach is the ability to encapsulate, abstract, model, and apply component technologies. While this is possible, it is extremely expensive to do in todays design methodologies for anything other than the most simple, low-performance components and, even then, not necessarily reliable enough for military applications. If the talking teddy-bear pronounces a word with the wrong accent, it is not the end of the world. In the military context, such a design flaw might be!
Research that leads to efficient ways to design, encapsulate, abstract, and verify IP blocks, both digital and analog, including both hardware and software, is of critical importance to MIL-SOC.
While this is an area of importance commercially as well, commercial volumes support the idea of implementation teams of hundreds or even thousands (predicted in 2004) of designers. Military applications cannot support such investments, even if the engineers were available. The ability to perform the tasks mentioned above with small teams is essential. Automation of as much of the process is possible is the only viable path.