Concurrent engineering, a more systematic approach to creating high quality products at lower in significantly less time, has recently been promoted in the automotive, computer and electronics, and aerospace industries as a response to competitive pressures. It also attracted the attention of the Department of Defense and in 1988, the Institute f o r Defense Analyses (IDA) was asked to investigate concurrent engineering. We describe the investigation, present highlights of the evidence, and set forth the principal findings and recommendations. The paper includes a sample of reported benefits, an outline of the methods and technologies of concurrent engineering, and a conceptual framework to describe the continuing research needed in this area.

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* 2.5. The prototype demonstration environment must be instrumented to determine the performance effects of running tools under the EIS as opposed to running them without the EIS.

ASIC microprocessors are becoming an important technology for the control of complex ("embedded") systems. The advantage of such microprocessors is that they can be tailored to the application. This tailoring is quite non-intuitive and optimization is a complex process. Tools such as the Architect's Workbench (AWB) have been developed to assist in this optimization.An example study shows a more than two to one advantage of such assisted analysis.

Migration of functionality into microcode for the purposes of performance improvement and increased security may be oriented toward the migration of abstract data types. This provides a model of migration consistent with current models of machine architecture. An advantage is that information in making migration decisions can be drawn from the programmer's model of his problem as encapsulated in the data types in the program. In addition, the migration can be sensitive to changes in type visibility in various execution environments of the program. The paper discusses language aspects of abstract type oriented migration (ATOM) and details a working prototype implementation. Ada is used as the source language in the description of ATOM but C is used in the prototype.