It is recognized that formal design and verification methods are an important requirement for the attainment of high quality system designs. The field has evolved enormously during the last few years, resulting in the fact that formal design and verification methods are nowadays supported by several tools, both commercial and academic.
If different tools and users are to generate and read the same language then it is necessary that the same semantics is assigned by them to all constructs and elements of the language. The current IEEE standard VHDL language reference manual (LRM) tries...

People want more from the government. One thing they want more of is a sense of personal safety, at home and at work (Regulation, Fall 1991). People also want the government to quit wasting money. The objective of having the government provide a safer life for us and our children at minimum cost leads logically to looking at policy within the system involving the private sector plus governments at the federal and sub federal levels. Using numerical simulations our book takes an integrated quantitative look at how the various institutions influencing workplace safety lead to the observed...

As the computer gradually automates human-oriented tasks in multiple environ ments, the interface between computers and the ever-wider population of human users assumes progressively increasing importance. In the office environment, for instance, clerical tasks such as document filing and retrieval, and higher-level tasks such as scheduling meetings, planning trip itineraries, and producing documents for publication, are being partially or totally automated. The range of users for office oriented software includes clerks, secretaries, and businesspersons, none of whom are predominantly...

In the past five years, the field of electrostatic discharge (ESD) control has under gone some notable changes. Industry standards have multiplied, though not all of these, in our view, are realistic and meaningful. Increasing importance has been ascribed to the Charged Device Model (CDM) versus the Human Body Model (HBM) as a cause of device damage and, presumably, premature (latent) failure. Packaging materials have significantly evolved. Air ionization techniques have improved, and usage has grown. Finally, and importantly, the government has ceased imposing MIL-STD-1686 on all new...

Knowledge Representation and Relation Nets introduces a fresh approach to knowledge representation that can be used to organize study material in a convenient, teachable and learnable form. The method extends and formalizes concept mapping by developing knowledge representation as a structure of concepts and the relationships among them. Such a formal description of analogy results in a controlled method of modeling new' knowledge in terms of existing' knowledge in teaching and learning situations, and its applications result in a consistent and well-organized approach to problem...

At first glance, a book on "Design by Composition for Rapid Prototyping" may seem out of place in a series on Robotics. However, this work has a couple of strong connections to the field of robotics and the robotics community, and I am delighted to introduce it to the series. The first connection is the motivation behind Binnard's work. Michael Binnard came to Stanford after having done his Masters thesis at the M.LT. Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he designed and built small walking robots, such as Boadicea (http: //www.ai.mit.eduJprojects/boadicea/).At M.LT. he observed first-hand how...

One of the most intriguing questions about the new computer technology that has appeared over the past few decades is whether we humans will ever be able to make computers learn. As is painfully obvious to even the most casual computer user, most current computers do not. Yet if we could devise learning techniques that enable computers to routinely improve their performance through experience, the impact would be enormous. The result would be an explosion of new computer applications that would suddenly become economically feasible (e. g., personalized computer assistants that automatically...

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...

Multimedia computing has emerged in the last few years as a major area of research. Multimedia computer systems have opened a wide range of applications by combining a variety of information sources, such as voice, graphics, animation, images, audio, and full-motion video. Looking at the big picture, multimedia can be viewed as the merging of three industries: the computer, communications, and broadcasting industries.
Research and development efforts in multimedia computing can be divided into two areas. As the first area of research, much effort has been centered on the stand-alone...

Climate and Environmental Database Systems contains the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Climate and Environmental Database Systems, held November 21-23, 1995, in Hamburg, Germany.
Climate and environmental data may be separated into two classes, large amounts of well structured data and smaller amounts of less structured data. The large amounts are produced by numerical climate models and by satellites, handling data in the order of magnitude of 100 Tbytes for the climate modelling sites and 1000 Tbytes for the recording and processing of satellite...