Analytical Partition of Software Components for Evolvable and Reliable MEMS Design Tools

Transforming software requirements into a software design involves the iterative partition of a solution into software components. The process is human-intensive and does not guarantee that design objectives such as reusability, evolvability, and reliable performance are satisfied. The costly process of designing, building, and modifying high assurance systems motivates the need for precise methods and tools to generate designs whose corresponding implementations are reusable, evolvable, and reliable. This paper demonstrates an analytical approach for partitioning basic elements of a software solution into reusable and evolvable software components. First, we briefly overview the role of partitioning in current design methods and explain why computer-aided design (CAD) tools to automate the design of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are high assurance applications. Then we present our approach and apply it to the design of CAD software to layout an optimized design of a MEMS accelerometer to be used in the navigational units of aircraft. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our approach and future research directions.