Methodology is the future

With recent success in VLSI and CAD technologies more and more companies are looking into tradeoffs for the complete product specification, design and manufacturing in order to increase their market share or time-to-market for their products. This new emphasis moves the focus of design sciences into areas of market research, requirements capture and analysis, executable specification generation, system exploration with different architectures, technologies and libraries and software/hardware/mechanical codesign where the future productivity gain is the largest. With this new emphasis companies are trying to shorten the conceptualization, design and manufacturing time in order to introduce new models every year. In this paper we propose a design methodology that can shorten the design cycle significantly. This is achieved by specifying the design at the highest level of abstractions and using powerful tools to complete the rest of the design. We also reflect on a design example that was generated using this methodology.