Concept and Architecture

Concept and Architecture Definition is the starting point for successful time-to-revenue solutions. As a leading design services provider, Zaiq is able to create quality specifications for our customers. Zaiq insists that these specifications are consistent in quality and content across projects. Zaiq also uses its extensive domain expertise to develop clear requirements for specification content developed by customers to facilitate efficient and timely execution of design projects.

Specifications occur at every level in the design process. In complex system solutions, specifications are required for both the hardware and the software portions of the design. The specifications must completely describe the behavior of the design as seen by the outside world. Zaiq standards for specification content is as follows:

Hardware Design

• Overview
• Functional Requirements
• Physical Requirements
• Design Requirements
• Block Diagrams
• Data Flow (i.e. packet flow) diagrams
• Interfaces to External System
• Timing Requirements
• Performance Requirements
• Manufacturing Test Methodology
• Interface to Software
• Software Model and Software Requirements
• Verification Plan

Software Design

• Overview
• Functionality Requirements
• Timing Requirements
• Performance Requirements
• Interface to Hardware
• Software Structure, Kernel

Zaiq is looking into advanced means for specification and concept and architecture development. Currently, specifications are text documents, but the industry is moving toward techniques to help make hardware and software specifications more robust and useful. The two major techniques currently being used are Formal Specifications and Executable Specifications.

• Formal Specification

  This type of specification is considered promising in the long term. Once a formal specification is generated for a design, formal methods such as property checking can be used to prove that a specific implementation meets the requirements of the specification.

  A number of formal specification languages have been developed (i.e. VSPEC for VHDL). These languages typically provide a mechanism for describing not only functional behavior, but timing, power, and area requirements as well. To date, formal specification has not been used widely for commercial designs, but continues to be an important research topic.

• Executable Specifications

  More useful for describing functional behavior in most design situations, an executable specification is typically an abstract model for the hardware and/or software being written in C, C++, SDL, Vera, Specman, etc. At the lower levels, hardware is typically described using Verilog or VHDL.

  Most executable specifications address only the functional behavior of a system, so it is still necessary to describe critical physical specifications (i.e. timing, power, clock frequency, area, etc.) in a written document. Efforts are under way to develop more robust ways to capture timing and physical design requirements.

Zaiq is cognizant of advances in these specification techniques, as well as others, and stays ahead of the usage curve to add high value in the design process.

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