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,...

System-Level Synthesis deals with the concurrent design of electronic applications, including both hardware and software. The issue has become the bottleneck in the design of electronic systems, including both hardware and software, in several major industrial fields, including telecommunications, automotive and aerospace engineering. The major difficulty with the subject is that it demands contributions from several research fields, including system specification, system architecture, hardware design, and software design. Most existing book cover well only a few aspects of...

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...

System-on-Chip Methodologies & Design Languages brings together a selection of the best papers from three international electronic design language conferences in 2000. The conferences are the Hardware Description Language Conference and Exhibition (HDLCon), held in the Silicon Valley area of USA; the Forum on Design Languages (FDL), held in Europe; and the Asia Pacific Chip Design Language (APChDL) Conference. The papers cover a range of topics, including design methods, specification and modeling languages, tool issues, formal verification, simulation and synthesis. The results...

System-Level Synthesis deals with the concurrent design of electronic applications, including both hardware and software. The issue has become the bottleneck in the design of electronic systems, including both hardware and software, in several major industrial fields, including telecommunications, automotive and aerospace engineering. The major difficulty with the subject is that it demands contributions from several research fields, including system specification, system architecture, hardware design, and software design. Most existing book cover well only a few aspects of...

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...