One Pass to Production
Funded by iDEN Division, Motorola ( Plantation )
Amount of Funding: $250,000 per year (total over 4 years: $1 Million expected to be continued through 2010)
Principal Investigator: Dr. Ravi Shankar
Co-PI: Dr. Borko Furht, Dr. Ankur Agarwal
Investigators: Dr. Hari Kalva , Dr. Ionut Cardei , Dr. Shihong Huang , and Dr. Valentine Aalo (Electrical Engineering).

Students: Fabiano Kovalski, Camilo Cruz ,Sifat Islam, Alana Rae Longshaw, Gabe Acevedo, James Ansley, Cyrus Trainer, Brian Petty, and Jacob Ezell.

This is a long term project in its fourth year of funding, with a goal to enhance system design productivity by nearly 500 fold, so a new cell phone can be readied for prototyping in 24 hours after user requirements are received. While the goal is audacious, there is precedence for this: Engineering Design Automation (EDA) of chip design has enhanced design productivity by 1000 fold over 30 years. We are attempting to incorporate similar concepts (complexity management, abstraction, automation, reuse, six sigma, etc.,) to enhance productivity here. The challenges, unlike the EDA, are in integrating concurrent development activities (in specification, software, hardware, and test) and at higher levels of the design flow. Our current flow uses NOC (network on chip) as the backbone to separate computing and communication concerns and abstract modeling with back annotation to rapidly evolve an optimal design while considering interactions amongst the concurrent activities and applications. Real-time and mobile system considerations add to the challenge.