Layering an engineering information system

In this note we deene a layering intended to structure the many concepts which arise in the development of an Engineering Information System. The industrial beneets to be gained by such a layering are enumerated. An Engineering Information System (EIS) is a collection of facilities and services that provide support for the design, testing, manufacture, and maintenance of engineering artifacts, and for the managerial and administrative concerns that accompany these tasks. Engineers and their managers engaged in hardware, software, mechanical, and architectural design, or other complex engineering activities involving large amounts of information, will beneet from the availability of EIS services, which we expect to become widespread in the next decade. The need for EIS services is particularly acute in the digital hardware engineering domain. As more and more circuitry is packed onto VLSI chips, no single engineer can have a full grasp of the the chip design. Instead, the design process is caaried out by multiple engineers working concurrently. Their needs for controlled sharing of information have inspired much recent work in the database community Katz 87]). This work includes support for versions and alternatives of objects, connguration management, long transactions, and object-oriented databases. Current-day chip designers nd that no single vendor can supply all the design tools needed. Unfortunatly, tools from diierent vendors often require diierent data input formats , and assign diierent semantics to the same pieces of data. To pass data between incompatible design tools, data format translators must be written. Translation often incurs loss of information Wiederhold 86]. An EIS can avoid translation by providing base data in one or two standard hardware design representation languages, such as EDIF and VHDL. To attach a new tool should require only writing an interface translator. With large design projects, managers will require automated means of enforcing design policies and of monitoring the status of designs. Again, an EIS will facilitate these tasks by providing a way for managers to declare design constraints and to specify moments at which the constraints must be validated. The DoD feels that for the U.S. to remain competitive in the world market for application-speciic integrated circuits, the design cost and risks associated with building these circuits must be lowered. In order to do so, design environments are needed that provide seamless interfaces between system speciication, chip design, layout, manufacturing, and test. Since it is unlikely that any one vendor will ever be …