Research Of Concurrent Design Methodology And Virtual Prototyping Simulation Environment For Electronic Products

With the rapid development of the digital technology and widely application ofembedded systems, the electfonic products are improved a lot both in function and inperformance. HoweveT, the design of electronic products is getting more complex at thesame time. On the other hand, the time-to-market is much shorter because of marketcompetition. So, the traditional design methodologies and environments cannot meet therequirements. The raPid development of Virtual Prototyping (VP) offers a good basis fOrthe innovation in design methodology. This paPer mainly addresses the followingtechniques in the design of electronic productst concurrent design methodo1ogy based onVP and some important techniques in building VP simulation environment.Compared to physical prototypes used in traditional design process, virtua1 prototypehas many advantages, such as low cost (in time and money), great flexibility and so on.So, more and more attentions had been paid to the research and application of VP in thepast ten years. But most of them only confined to some iso1ated design phases by noWand there sti1l lack of good design methodology for using VP to support the wholelife-cycle of electronic products. Currently Anowledge-based method andconstraint-based method are usually used in concurrent design. But, both of them cannotsupport the design with great complexity, and cannot meet the requirement of the designinnovation. This paper presented the concept of Incremental Virtual P1'ototyping (IVP),and described evolving process of the virtual prototype by a tree-like model namedVirtual Prototyping Tree. Then, this paPer preseflted Concurrent Design MethodologyBased on IVP which establishes a good foundation for using VP to support concurrentdesign and can promote the research and aPplication of both VP and concurrent designtechniques.E1ectronic product design involves more than one discipline, so multi-disciplinaryco-simulation is a key problem in simulation of virtual prototype. NoW there exists manydifferences in design floW design style and modeling language among differentdisciplines, and such diversity will exist in foreseeable future. So, we adopted theheterogeneous aPproach, and presented a novel model fOr heterogeneous modeling andsimulation, naxned DomainObject Model. This model has layered abstract mecha-nism,and solves the heterogeneity at syntax level and semanic level by DomainObjectencaPsulation and signal matching respectively. This model can effectively suppoft themulti-disciplinary co-simulation at the abstract model level.ffi III NAccording to DomainObject Model, interactions between different tools can be abstracted to interactions between semantic models. This paper introduced a formal framework, within which the semantic models usually used in electronic product design are analyzed. Then, this paper presented an interaction mechanism among different semantic models by signal matching based on the formal framework.VP Simulation under heterogeneous approach requires interaction and coordination among different tools. The heterogeneity of tools may exist in discipline, supporting platform, and so on. So the situation can be very complex. This paper analyzed the essence of DomainObject interaction based on the layered abstract model, and presented a framework of multi-disciplinary co-simulation platform, including the multi-layered architecture and communication protocol. According to this framework, we developed a distributed multi-disciplinary co-simulation platform named CoSimBus. CoSimBus provides standard interface for tools in each discipline, hides the details of the interaction, and provides a unified interface for interaction and management based on the DomainObject. All these make it easy to integrate different tools, and the simulation environment based on CoSimBus is flexible and scalable.CoSimBus provides the communication and synchronization mechanism for the interaction among DomainObjects. This paper an...