CoFluent Design helps designers take the right decisions at the right time; CoFluent Studio enables designers to get accurate models of hardware/software systems in projects' first 20%

PARIS, Nov. 4, 2004

80% of design decisions are taken in a project’s first 20%

It is an admitted fact that 80% of design decisions are taken in the first 20% of a project’s total development time. Further development of a system is mostly driven by those early decisions: making the right choices will make the difference between success and failure of a project. Major design errors often result from wrong decisions taken at the beginning of a project and are usually detected during its later phases, what heavily impacts its development cost and time.
However, designers rely on quite few data at the beginning of a project for carefully taking decisions. They usually start from customer’s requirements or system specifications and quickly decide on the system’s architecture, encompassing hardware, software and communications, mainly from spreadsheets and based on experience/expertise with reused or derived designs.
Today’s technological and economical environments leave no room for improvisation; developers may afford guessing, but they can’t afford failing.

Traditional ESL design or MDA/MDD tools can’t help

System-Level Design (SLD) is seen as a way to address some of the issues cited above, but finds itself “instantiated” differently and separately in the hardware and software domains.
In the semiconductors field, Electronic System-Level (ESL) design tools get a lot of attention in the marketplace. However, such tools provide results when projects are already at 70% or more of their development time as cycle-accurate hardware models and the almost completed software code need to be available, what takes time and money to obtain. At this stage, such tools can only deliver a confirmation of whether the taken design decisions were the right ones or not, but they don’t really help taking those high-level decisions early on the project.
On the embedded software side, Model-Driven Architecture/Design (MDA/MDD) tools are still very immature at addressing mixed hardware/software systems and analyzing performance properties. They can’t really help with architecture-related decisions.

CoFluent Studio bridges the gap between specifications, design and implementation

Modeling electronic systems with CoFluent Studio™ early on their project can help designers take the right decisions when it matters: before it’s too late.
CoFluent Studio is a system modeling & simulation toolset that helps developers of embedded systems and chips take the right decisions for ensuring efficient implementation. Based on an intuitive system-level design methodology, CoFluent Studio enables designers to get an accurate global model of their hardware/software systems in a project’s first 20%, when 80% of decisions are taken. Early simulation delivers prospective information on how and how well the real system is expected to behave. Designers easily try different design choices and quickly find the optimal system architecture that will deliver the right functionality on the right platform for the best cost/performance ratio.
In the end, CoFluent Studio contributes to improving time-to-profitability by mitigating project delay and cancellation risks, optimizing the final product and improving productivity.

About CoFluent Design

See http://www.cofluentdesign.com