Towards Flexible Systems Engineering by Using Flexible Quantity Contracts

With increasing design complexity flexible systems engineering becomes a challenging issue in SoC and embedded system design. Furthermore the heterogeneity of different components of a single system leads to a trend to distribute the development process over several companies. Today we already find such distributed design processes in automotive engineering and space applications, where software plays an important role. We expect a similar development in SoC design. We propose an approach that introduces flexible quantity contracts into distributed SoC design processes. Flexible quantity contracts are well known in operations management, particularly in research on supply chains. Applied to SoC design, these contracts will lead to an extension of the period design trade-offs can be conducted to realize a significantly better overall outcome. To enable flexible quantity contracts we propose a structured data format for estimated design data. By using structured estimation design data, combined with flexible quantity contracts we expect improved design productivity in inter-company design processes. Related Topics Development processes and their improvements

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