New manufacturing technologies have made possible the integration of entire systems on a single chip. This new design paradigm, termed system-on-chip (SOC), together with its associated manufacturing problems, represents a real challenge for designers.

SOC is also reshaping approaches to test and validation activities. These are beginning to migrate from the traditional register-transfer or gate levels of abstraction to the system level. Until now, test and validation have not been supported by system-level design tools so designers have lacked the infrastructure to exploit all the...

Embedded systems have become indispensable in our lives: household appliances, cars, airplanes, power plant control systems, medical equipment, telecommunication systems, space technology, they all contain digital computing systems with dedicated functionality. Most of them, if not all, are real-time systems, i.e. their responses to stimuli have timeliness constraints.

The timeliness requirement has to be met despite some unpredictable, stochastic behaviour of the system. In this book, we address one cause of such stochastic behaviour, namely the application and platform-dependent...