Cost Feasibility Analysis for Embedded System Development and the Impact of Various Methodologies on Product Development Cycle

The cost and the time-to-market for a product will increase exponentially if innovations are not brought and deployed into the product development cycle (PDC). This is due to the fact the system complexity is increasing exponentially with time. This increasing complexity results from introduction of new protocols, higher radio frequencies, and increasing number of applications, among others, in the case of mobile devices. Such factors have led to the exploration of the multi-core architecture. The software (SW) and hardware (HW) concurrency, and need for optimization, in such architectures, will further complicate the product development process. Therefore, it is imperative that we introduce new and innovative ways to enhance productivity. Researcher have proposed new concepts such as executable specifications, component based design, system modeling language (SysML), model driven design (MDD), software decomposition, abstract performance evaluation, system level verification, field programmable gate array (FPGA) based network-on-chip (NOC), and abstract concurrency modeling. These proposed modeling, design and development techniques aim at increasing productivity by introducing leading edge design methodologies into PDC. In this paper we present a cost model that aims at understanding the current PDC and at evaluating the impact of new technologies on PDC. We focus on cost and product development time, and compare them for the existing PDC and the new PDC that we have conceptualized. We refer to this new PDC as “One Pass to Production” (OPP). This cost model may also help one identify potential bottlenecks and areas for further automations.