The increased demands of a primary rate system in terms of both processing power and I/O bandwidth will require a far more sophisticated design tool than was used for the original system. The new design environment should offer the following advantages :

- integrated solution covering all aspects of the design process from circuit/schematic entry and analogue and digital simulation/analysis
-large component libraries and the ability to import standard descriptions (e.g. VHDL)
-integrated ASIC design capabilities
-support for future enhancements and technological changes

The use of modern design tools and methods will have a direct impact on the cost and quality of the electronic products designed and developed by the company as well as in other factors (time-to-market) which determine company's place in the market. The direct benefits expected could be summarised in cost reduction, improved product quality and shorter time-to-market.

This Application Experiment concerns the redesign of an ISDN pod for advanced test equipment, to support multiple S2M links. V5.2 systems can use up to 16 S2M interfaces between the Access Network and Local Exchange, and a simulator must be able to handle this in order to test these systems in their maximum configuration. Signalling system number 7 exchanges share their message load over several links, and over a maximum of 4 channels within each link. This is beyond the current capabilities of any test system thus making a qualitative assessment impossible.