RASSP ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGIES FOR SIGNAL PROCESSOR LIFE-CYCLE SUPPORT

Enterprise integration technologies are a key contributor to improving time-to-market, cost, and design quality by a factor, which is the go al of the DARPA Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Proce ssors (RASSP) program [1]. The Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab oratories (ATL) RASSP team developed a productivity improvement model, shown in Fig. 1, that indicates the relative contributions of various RASSP technologies to the overall improvement. Enterprise technologie s address the entire 17% enterprise partition, and more than half of t he 30% reuse and model-year architecture partition, thus accounting fo r at least 35% of the overall RASSP productivity improvement. The ATL RASSP approach to implement enterprise systems is to extend commercial technologies so the results are available to a broad base of potentia l users. Unlike current automation concepts which start at later stage s of the development cycle, the RASSP enterprise system supports the e ntire signal processor life cycle. Core concepts of the enterprise sys tem include: Tools and tool frameworks integrated into an enterprise e nvironment Program execution control through workflows Integrated data management functions Design reuse Concurrent engineering team support Integrated design engineering and manufacturing. The model-year archi tecture, which enables users to rapidly, efficiently upgrade systems w ith new technology, is supported in the enterprise system by a robust reuse management system. Manufacturing interface and communication ser vices elements of the enterprise system provide improved concurrent en gineering support for distributed product teams. The enterprise system will be provided to commercial and aerospace users as products, inclu ding a reusable set of workflows for electronics design, commercial to ols supporting the enterprise system environment, and utilities to ena ble users to customize the RASSP enterprise system for a particular or ganization or project. The enterprise system development cycle include s four build cycles with increasing capabilities. The ATL team complet ed the Build 2 implementation in May'96. This implementation supports the processes associated detailed hardware/software design, architectu re design, and trade-off analyses. It is being used at Lockheed Martin and multiple government sites for benchmarking and evaluation. Result s to date indicate >5:1 productivity improvements in the manufacturing interface, and 5-10% improvements in design engineering, which is gro wing with increasing level of utilization.