Estimating design time for system circuits

Abstract

System design complexity is growing rapidly. As a result, current development costs are constantly increasing. It is becoming increasingly difficult to estimate how much time it will take to design and verify these designs, which are getting denser and increasingly more complex. To compound this problem, circuit design cost estimation still does not have a quantitative approach. Although designing a system is very resource consuming, there is little work invested in measuring, understanding, and estimating the effort required.To address part of the current shortcomings, this paper introduces µPCBComplexity, a methodology to measure and estimate PCB (printed circuit board) design effort. PCBs are the central component of many systems and require large amounts of resources to properly design and verify. µPCBComplexity consists of two main parts; a procedure to account for the contributions of the different elements in the design, and a non-linear statistical regression of experimental measures in order to determine a good design effort metric. We use µPCBComplexity to evaluate a series of design effort estimators for twelve PCB designs. By using the proposed µPCBComplexity metric, designers can estimate PCB design effort.