Executable specifications needed, but languages are limited

Is your next product doomed by the time development starts? If your marketing team is providing paper specifications to the engineering department, your product could be dead on arrival. If the engineering team is using email to notify contractors of a change in subsystem requirements, your product could be dead on arrival.

Paper specifications have been the norm for electronic product design. Marketing gathers customer requirements and writes them down. Procurement tracks the supply chain and sends reports to engineering. The system integrator often relies on email communication to subcontractors. The larger the paper trail, the more likely you are to introduce a design error.

Design and supply chain complexity make communication between project stakeholders a key factor in product success. Marketing needs to clearly express user requirements and use cases to engineering. Functional decomposition and validation are required across the development effort. The system designer and integrator need to provide clear specifications of subsystems to subcontractors and third-parties. This requires a detailed definition of subsystem boundaries and I/Os, as well as interactions with other subsystems.

The system architecture determines performance, functionality, power consumption, and cost at an early stage. This stage establishes the design's value and defines the market competitiveness of the end product. Paper is no longer sufficient. Executable specifications are needed.

Executable specifications must be high level so that they are not dependent upon implementation artifacts. This helps avoid high modeling costs and effort while ensuring maximum flexibility. The specification should cover mixed hardware/software and application/platform descriptions. If they are not truly at the system level, they will not deliver an optimized architecture.

Equally important, the executable specification must be sharable. This necessitates that the models can be easily exchanged in electronic format and viewed independently from editing, similar to the way Acrobat Reader enables viewing documents in PDF format.

CoFluent Studio enables application-driven system architecture for right functionality following system design and architecting front end, system level verification environment, rapid design exploration cycle, providing system executable specifications and common HW/SW refrence.