System design complexity is growing rapidly. As a result, current development costs can be staggering and are constantly increasing. As designers produce ever larger and more complex systems, it is becoming increasingly difficult to estimate how much time it will take to design and verify these designs. To compound this problem, system 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 any system and can 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, which is coupled with a non-linear statistical regression of experimental measures. We use µPCBComplexity to evaluate a series of design effort estimators on several PCB designs. By using the proposed µPCBComplexity metric, designers can estimate PCB design effort…

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