Design Reuse Methodology Research Articles

A design reuse technology to increase productivity through automated corporate memory system

Increasing competitiveness in engineering industry pressurizes companies to improve productivity of every single element in processes. As a result of this pressure, increasing productivity of design staff and design systems is systematically investigated by industry professionals and researchers. Design reuse appears as an effective approach to increase productivity levels. It has been already used personally by designers consciously or subconsciously. This paper proposes a computer-based design reuse methodology developed with the purpose of efficient corporate memory usage. The paper focused on steel construction infrastructure design process; however, its approach can be easily implemented in different engineering design processes.

Second-stage tuning procedure for analogue CMOS design reuse methodology

Proposed is a two-stage analogue circuit design reuse methodology by extending existing fabrication process rescaling procedures with a follow-on systematic tuning procedure stage based on DC output voltage scaling. It increases the potential for design reuse with short-channel MOSFET circuit designs when compared to the current single-stage rescaling work. Two Miller amplifier circuits were designed in 0.18 and 0.13 µm CMOS processes in order to analyse circuit performance achieved with the proposed method compared to the existing methods. The additional tuning stage results in an improved amplifier gain up to 16 dB and up to 2.5 times faster settling time compared to single-stage scaling with 33% power reduction and 28% smaller silicon area when compared to the original design.

Application of design reuse to artificial neural networks: case study of the back propagation algorithm

The aim of this paper is to propose a new high-level hardware design reuse methodology for automatic generation of artificial neural networks (ANNs) descriptions. A case study of the back propagation (BP) algorithm is proposed. To achieve our goal, the proposed design methodology is based on a modular design of the ANN. The originality of the work is the application of design for reuse (DFR) and the design with reuse (DWR) concepts to ANNs. The DFR is used for the generation of the general ANN architecture, while the DWR is applied for the exploration and exploitation of predefined ANN submodules components that are stocked in a library. The result is a synthesis and parameterisable soft IP-ANN VHDL code ready for placement and routing. With this approach, the user/designer can fix the ANN parameters and choose between different architectural possibilities and performances. The approach has been applied to the three case figures of the BP algorithm. These are the “off-chip implementation,” the “on-chip static implementation” and the “on-chip-based run time reconfiguration (RTR).” To validate our approach, performance evaluation of the three case architectures of the BP algorithm, using the Virtex-II and Virtex-4 FPGA is done through three examples: the XOR problem, a cardiac arrhythmia classifier and a high-dimension ANN circuit. To evaluate the design reuse concept, two tests are done: the first one concerns estimation of the cost of the design. Results show that the application of the DFR is time consuming compared to the design from scratch: 168% for the “off-chip implementation,” 256% for the “on-chip static implementation” and 260% for the “on-chip RTR.” However, after reuse, the design time is reduced to 0.5% for “off-chip implementation,” 2.08% for “on-chip static implementation” and 2.5% for “on-chip RTR implementation.” The second test concerns evaluation of the generated IP-ANN code, using the OpenMore tool. Results show a mean score of 62% which lead us to conclude that the IP-ANN code is good to be reused.

Evaluation of product performance in product family design re-use

Design re-use is essential to competitive and sustainable product development. In product family design, re-use leads to savings in resources and ensures sustainable production. However, a complete design re-use process model for product family design has not been well defined. Moreover, the evaluation of product performance based on component-level re-use has been inadequate, failing to explore the effective application of design re-use in product family design. This paper presents a product family design re-use (PFDR) methodology to address these deficiencies. A three-stage process model is proposed to manage the design processes. The information content assessment (ICA) method is proposed for product performance evaluation. This method defines the logical steps to compute the information content that is used as a uniform, dimensionless metric of product performance. In a case study, a product family of cellular phones were developed using this design re-use methodology. It is demonstrated that the design re-use methodology proposed in this paper can effectively manage the product family design processes, and the ICA method provides a useful way for performance evaluation.

Design Reuse Methodology for Product Family Design

This paper presents a design reuse methodology to facilitate product family design. Three major processes are defined, namely, information modelling, information processing, and solution synthesis and evaluation. The information content assessment (ICA) method is proposed for solution evaluation. This method defines logical steps to compute the information content that is used as a uniform, dimensionless metric of product performances. In a case study, product families of the cellular phone were developed using the design reuse methodology. It is demonstrated that the design reuse method proposed in this paper can effectively manage the product family design processes, and the ICA method provides a useful way for performance evaluation.

Designing and implementingChoices

We describe our experiences in constructing Choices and a design methodology that extends existing design approaches by explicitly encouraging specialization, as well as design and code reuse. Although many operating system techniques and designs are well documented, few object-oriented operating systems exist and have been described. SOS [23], CHORUS [18], and Apertos [26] are other examples of object-oriented operating systems. None of the descriptions of the design of these operating systems provide a methodology for design reuse or describe how the design methodology may be used in conjunction with prototyping