This article describes our experiences using the Application Modeling and Mapping methodology (AMM) based on commercial tooling from Synopsys. This methodology is valuable at the technical and organizational level for investigating the feasibility of new electronic products.

Technically, the methodology reduces the risk by giving architects a clear understanding of the application and features in an early stage of the project. This is related to system performance, hardware and software allocation on available resources, software scheduling scenarios and architecture dimensions and decisions (what-if scenarios).

On the organizational level, the methodology facilitates the early collaboration of system architects, software developers and hardware designers based on an executable specification of the product. Within this article the AMM methodology is discussed and applied to a dual DAB reception application. For the different aspects as described above, the benefits and disadvantage are shown and discussed.

The continuous integration of more and more applications into a single device imposes huge challenges on the design of electronic products. Given the enormous cost of an SoC design project, the system architect has a very difficult task to define the right system architecture that supports all the desired application use-cases in an optimal way:

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