The second half of this century will remain as the era of proliferation of electronic computers. They did exist before, but they were mechanical. During next century they may perform other mutations to become optical or molecular or even biological. Actually, all these aspects are only fancy dresses put on mathematical machines. This was always recognized to be true in the domain of software, where "machine" or "high level" languages are more or less rigourous, but immaterial, variations of the universaly accepted mathematical language aimed at specifying elementary operations, functions,...

Electronic Chips & Systems Design Languagesoutlines and describes the latest advances in design languages. The challenge of System on a Chip (SOC) design requires designers to work in a multi-lingual environment which is becoming increasingly difficult to master. It is therefore crucial for them to learn, almost in real time, from the experiences of their colleagues in the use of design languages and how these languages have become more advanced to cope with system design.
System designers, as well as students willing to become system designers, often do not have the time to...

Low Power Design in Deep Submicron Electronics deals with the different aspects of low power design for deep submicron electronics at all levels of abstraction from system level to circuit level and technology. Its objective is to guide industrial and academic engineers and researchers in the selection of methods, technologies and tools and to provide a baseline for further developments. Furthermore the book has been written to serve as a textbook for postgraduate student courses. In order to achieve both goals, it is structured into different chapters each of which addresses a...

The success of VHDL since it has been balloted in 1987 as an IEEE standard may look incomprehensible to the large population of hardware designers, who had never heared of Hardware Description Languages before (for at least 90% of them), as well as to the few hundreds of specialists who had been working on these languages for a long time (25 years for some of them). Until 1988, only a very small subset of designers, in a few large companies, were used to describe their designs using a proprietary HDL, or sometimes a HDL inherited from a University when some software environment happened to be...