Fundamentals of Adsorption is the proceedings of the fifth International Conference on the Fundamentals of Adsorption, which was held on May 13-18, 1995 at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. This conference was organized completely under the auspices of the International Adsorption Society. It was attended by 196 participants from 24 countries. Members of the Scientific Advisory Board, together with the Conference Committee, selected papers for presentation from a large number of proposals involving an especially high level of international participation....

Co-Design is the set of emerging techniques which allows for the simultaneous design of Hardware and Software. In many cases where the application is very demanding in terms of various performances (time, surface, power consumption), trade-offs between dedicated hardware and dedicated software are becoming increasingly difficult to decide upon in the early stages of a design. Verification techniques - such as simulation or proof techniques - that have proven necessary in the hardware design must be dramatically adapted to the simultaneous verification of Software and Hardware.
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The VITAL specification addresses the issues of interoperability, backannotation and high performance simulation for sign-off quality ASIC libraries in VHDL. VITAL provides modeling guidelines and a set of pre-defined packages (containing pre-defined routines for modeling functionality and timing) to facilitate the acceleration of designs which use cells from a VITAL library. The VITAL Level-I guidelines constrain the modeling capabilities provided by VHDL in order to facilitate higher performance (Figure I). Accumulating "gains" Constrained "flexibility" Higher performance & Increased...

Object-oriented techniques and languages have been proven to significantly increase engineering efficiency in software development. Many benefits are expected from their introduction into electronic modeling. Among them are better support for model reusability and flexibility, more efficient system modeling, and more possibilities in design space exploration and prototyping. Object-Oriented Modeling explores the latest techniques in object-oriented methods, formalisms and hardware description language extensions.
The seven chapters comprising this book provide an overview of...

Models in system design follow the general tendency in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. While a model should be a manageable representation of a system, this increasing complexity sometimes forces current CAD-tool designers and model writers to apply modeling techniques to the model itself. Model writers are interested in instrumenting their model, so as to extract critical information before the model is complete. CAD tools designers use internal representations of the design at various stages. The complexity has also led CAD-tool developers to develop...

In system design, generation of high-level abstract models that can be closely associated with evolving lower-level models provides designers with the ability to incrementally test' an evolving design against a model of a specification. Such high-level models may deal with areas such as performance, reliability, availability, maintainability, and system safety. Abstract models also allow exploration of the hardware versus software design space in an incremental fashion as a fuller, detailed design unfolds, leaving behind the old practice of hardware-software binding too early in the design...

Modeling in Analog Design highlights some of the most pressing issues in the use of modeling techniques for design of analogue circuits. Using models for circuit design gives designers the power to express directly the behaviour of parts of a circuit in addition to using other pre-defined components. There are numerous advantages to this new category of analog behavioral language. In the short term, by favouring the top-down design and raising the level of description abstraction, this approach provides greater freedom of implementation and a higher degree of technology independence....

Models in System Design tracks the general trend in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. System design is by nature combined with prototyping, mixed domain design, and verification, and it is no surprise that today's modeling and models are used in various levels of system design and verification. In order to deal with constraints induced by volume and complexity, new methods and techniques have been defined. Models in System Design provides an overview of the latest modeling techniques for use by system designers.
The first part of...

Hardware description languages (HDL) such as VHDL and Verilog have found their way into almost every aspect of the design of digital hardware systems. Since their inception they gradually proved to be an essential part of modern design methodologies and design automation tools, ever exceeding their original goals of being description and simulation languages. Their use for automatic synthesis, formal proof, and testing are good examples.
So far, HDLs have been mainly dealing with digital systems. However, integrated systems designed today require more and more analog parts such as A/D...