ABSTRACT
System-level design covers a wide range of design activities and design situations. It includes the more specific activity system engineering, that involves the requirements development, test planning, subsystem interfacing, and end-to-end analysis of systems. System-level design is sometimes called system architecting,
a term used
widely in the aerospace industry. General-purpose system-level design involves the design of programmable digital systems, including
the basic modules containing storage, processors, input/output, and system controllers. At the system level, the design activities include determining the following:
• the power budget (the amount of power allocated to each module in the system); • the cost and performance budget allocated to each module in the system; • the interconnection strategy; • the selection of commercial off-the-shelf modules (COTS); • the packaging of each module; • the overall packaging strategy; • the number of processors, storage units, and input/output interfaces required; and • the overall characteristics of each processor, storage unit, and input/output interface.
