When it comes to frameworks, the familiar story of the elephant and the six blind philosophers seems to apply. As each philoso- pher encountered a separate part of the elephant, each pronounced his considered, but flawed judgement. One blind philosopher felt a leg and thought it a tree. Another felt the tail and thought he held a rope. Another felt the elephant's flank and thought he stood before a wall. We're supposed to learn about snap judgements from this alle- gory, but its author might well have been describing design automation frameworks. For in the reality of today's product...

In order to design and build computers that achieve and sustain high performance, it is essential that reliability issues be considered care- fully. The problem has several aspects. Certainly, considering reliability implies that an engineer must be able to analyze how design decisions affect the incidence of failure. For instance, in order design reliable inte- gritted circuits, it is necessary to analyze how decisions regarding design rules affect the yield, i.e., the percentage of functional chips obtained by the manufacturing process. Of equal importance in producing reliable computers is...

Our purpose in writing this book was two-fold. First, we wanted to compile a chronology of the research in the field of mixed-mode simulation over the last ten to fifteen years. A substantial amount of work was done during this period of time but most of it was published in archival form in Masters theses and Ph. D. dissertations. Since the interest in mixed-mode simulation is growing, and a thorough review of the state-of-the-art in the area was not readily available, we thought it appropriate to publish the information in the form of a book. Secondly, we wanted to provide enough information...