For the near future, the recent predictions and roadmaps of silicon semiconductor technology all agree that the number of transistors on a chip will keep growing exponentially according to Moore's Law, pushing technology towards the system-on-a-chip (SOC) era. However, we are increasingly experiencing a productivity gap where the chip complexity that can be handled by current design teams falls short of the possibilities offered by technological advances. Together with growing time-to-market pressures, this drives the need for innovative measures to increase design productivity by orders of...