01 Jul 2002
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Moore's Law
Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit, doubling every year, and predicted that this trend would continue.
Gordon Moore made his famous observation in 1965, just four years after the first planar integrated circuit was discovered.
The press called it 'Moore's Law' and the name has stuck. In his original paper, Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit, doubling every year, and predicted that this trend would continue. This relation held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months. The doubling period has remained at that value since. Moore's Law is apparently self-fulfilling. The implication is that somebody, somewhere is going to be able to build a better chip than you if you rest on your laurels, so you'd better start pushing hard on the problem.
The impact on consumer electronics has been immense - just look at your home computer, or car electronics - as has the impact on military electronics. How can you design, manufacture, and maintain an information processing system for a military system having a lifecycle measured in tens of years, when the semiconductor components you are using have a lifecycle measured in tens of months?
Addressing this conundrum has been the objective of a recently completed European research programme known as ESPADON.
The primary goal of the programme was to significantly improve, by reducing cost and timescales, the process by which complex military digital systems are designed, documented, manufactured and supported.
A new design methodology and a supporting environment (set of software tools) has been defined to support this goal through software re-use, concurrent engineering of hardware and software, ability to incorporate new commercial devices as they become available, and the key concepts of rapid and virtual prototyping.
Rapid prototyping is the ability to seamlessly move from the functional design (defining the flow of information and the computations carried out on them) to the architectural design (defining the computer chips and their interconnections, and modelling them) to the implementation (code running on a real-time test bed).
Virtual prototyping is the ability to model and simulate in software the complete signal processing application to validate the architecture selection prior to implementing it in hardware.
Partners in the programme were Thales, MBDA, and the ATC. We have been congratulated by the French and UK MoDs on the success of the programme, which has demonstrated, through benchmarking the development of sonar and radar digital systems, that productivity gains of up to 16 can be achieved using the outputs from ESPADON.
One of the spin-offs from the project for BAE SYSTEMS has been the decision by Avionics to invest in the use of the GEDAE rapid prototyping tool - identified by ESPADON as best-of-class for commercial software - to support the Eurofighter Typhoon radar.
We are also supporting the wider adoption of GEDAE by the creation of a Company wide User Group.
