The SIMBA project extends the current design methodology towards the tight integration of requirements in each design step and at each abstraction level.It uses existing system- and software engineering concepts and tries to apply them to the development of System-on-Chip designs. A state-of-the-art requirements engineering tool is to be used to gather SOC requirements, which are then extracted and used to generate a system-level verification platform for the given design. These testbenches are then gradually refined to lower levels to validate the (C-Code,RTL) design implementations. This ensures that the implementation satisfies the requirements, thus maintaining a linkage between the specification and implementation. Traceability and change management of requirements known from software engineering are to be supported as well as a design space exploration functionality to determine the most suitable SOC architecture, satisfying the given constraints.
The proposed design methodology is shown below. The CISC Semiconductors tool SyAD, supporting a number of different HDLs, is used as verification platform together with a power managment tool called Rheims to support the design-space exploration with focus on power-aware systems, like ad-hoc sensor networks and RFID.