12. Experience Management for Electronic Design Reuse

Abstract

The design of electronic circuits is a discipline in which two contrasting tendencies can be observed:O n the one hand, modern circuit designs get ever more complex and difficult to handle by electronic engineers. On the other hand, global competition requires a continuous reduction of development times. At the same time, the correctness and reliability of the designs should, of course, not suffer from shorter development cycles.

These requirements have become so dominant that they cannot be met anymore without extensive utilization of design reuse. It is getting vitally important for an electronic engineer to reuse old designs (or parts of them) and not to re-design a new application entirely from scratch.

This chapter describes a generic experience management approach for electronic design reuse. The results presented in this chapter have been achieved as part of the project READee (Reuse Assistant for Designs in Electronic Engineering), the project IPQ1 (IP Qualification for efficient system design) and the European MEDEA+ project TOOLIP2 (Methods and TOOLs for IP) and have been previously published in part (Vollrath 1998; Oehler et al. 1998; Oehler et al. 1998; Bergmann et al. 1999; Bergmann and Vollrath 1999; Koegst et al. 1999; Vollrath 2000).

IPQ is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) from 12/2000 till 11/2003. See www.ip-qualification.de.

MEDEA+ is part of the EUREKA initiative. The TOOLIP consortium includes 30 European partners. See toolip.fzi.de for details.