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RASSP Integrated System Tools Appnote

2.0 Introduction

The goal of the DARPA/Tri-Service sponsored Rapid Prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) program is to reduce digital signal processor development and manufacturing time and costs by a factor of four. Systems engineering decisions early in the design process significantly impact both the schedule and cost of a project. As shown in Figure 1 - 1, 80 percent of a product's life cycle cost are typically committed by the end of the design development phase. The Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories' (LM/ATL) RASSP team has developed a concurrent engineering design environment which helps the integrated product development team (IPDT) make better trade-offs early in the design process which effectively address life cycle costs. This concurrent engineering environment consists of Ascent Logic Corporation's (ALC) RDD - 100 systems engineering tool, Lockheed Martin's PRICE Systems parametric cost estimating tools and Management Sciences' Inc. (MSI) RAM-ILS tool, as shown in Figure 1 - 2. Design information is passed among these tools in this integrated systems engineering design environment to provide design, cost, reliability, availability and maintainability support to the IPDT. This design environment provides the IPDT with the information they need to make informed and effective decisions early, while making changes is still easy and inexpensive. Engineers are able to determine the impact of design decisions on life cycle costs with this integrated systems engineering environment.

The focus of this application note is to describe the overall RASSP systems engineering methodology, describe how the RASSP integrated system tools support this methodology and to illustrate the benefits of using these tools on an actual application. The intended audience for this application note are program managers, engineering managers and engineers supporting processing system trade-offs who are interested in reducing overall life cycle costs. Each of these groups are interested in a different aspect of this application note. Program managers will be primarily interested how better system level trade-offs can be performed which result in better system designs with lower development costs. Engineering managers will be interested in the overall system engineering process improvements presented in this application note. Engineers will be interested in learning how to perform their jobs more effectively with the use of the integrated RASSP tools. Although the use of these integrated tools have been tailored for signal processing applications on the RASSP program, there are no inherent reasons why these tools can not be extended to work in other domains.

The organization of this application note is as follows. Section 1 contains the executive summary which provides a top level overview for this application note. Section 2 presents the introduction which explains the overall content and organization of the document. Section 3 discusses the RASSP integrated systems engineering process, how the RASSP integrated tools support this process and the benefits for using this process. Section 4 illustrates how the RASSP systems engineering process and integrated tools are used for a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signal processing example. Section 5 contains a list of reference documents which support this application note.

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