cyclebycycle

Cyclebycycle refers to a design and analysis approach in systems engineering that treats operation as a sequence of discrete cycles. The emphasis is on determinism and observability, with state and outputs defined and measurable at the boundary of each cycle.

Core to cyclebycycle is the idea of partitioning work into fixed time cycles or clearly bounded control loops. Each cycle begins from a known state, performs a unit of computation or control action, and ends with updated state and metrics such as latency, throughput, and resource usage. Cycle counters and instrumentation enable per-cycle visibility.

Applications span embedded control, automotive electronic control units, industrial automation, robotics, and digital signal processing, where predictable timing is essential. The approach supports timing verification, schedulability analysis, and debugging by isolating effects to individual cycles, rather than across aggregate system behavior.

Historically, cyclebycycle grew out of real-time and synchronous design traditions and is closely associated with cycle-accurate simulation and time-triggered architectures. There is no universal standard for the terminology, and practices vary by domain. In practice, cyclebycycle is used to improve predictability, traceability, and repeatability, at the cost of added modeling and instrumentation overhead.

Related concepts include cycle-accurate simulation and time-triggered architectures.