The book includes high-quality papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystems and Regional Development at Universita Roma Tor Vergata, Italy, from 22 to 24 May, 2019. Providing insights into the relevance of smart learning ecosystems (schools, campuses, the workplace, informal learning contexts, etc.) for regional development and social innovation, it also discusses how citizens' involvement with smart ecosystems can be increased and made more effective.

This book explains for readers how 3D chip stacks promise to increase the level of on-chip integration, and to design new heterogeneous semiconductor devices that combine chips of different integration technologies (incl. sensors) in a single package of the smallest possible size. The authors focus on heterogeneous 3D integration, addressing some of the most important challenges in this emerging technology, including contactless, optics-based, and carbon-nanotube-based 3D integration, as well as signal-integrity and thermal management issues in copper-based 3D integration. Coverage also includes the 3D heterogeneous integration of power sources, photonic devices, and non-volatile memories based on new materials systems.

Telemetering systems and applications have moved far beyond the space flight telemetry most people have heard of to cutting-edge uses across a broad range of disciplines, including industry, medicine, and meteorology. To fully understand and participate in the acquisition of data this technology makes possible, scientists in these fields along with engineers new to telemetering require some background in the concepts, hardware, and software that makes the technology so valuable.

Introduction to PCM Telemetering Systems, Second Edition summarizes the techniques and terminology used in sending data and control information between users and the instruments that collect and process the data. It gives an overall systems introduction to the relevant topics in three primary areas: system interfaces; data transport, timing, and synchronization; and data transmission techniques. The topics addressed include sensor characteristics, user interface design, data filtering, data framing, statistical analysis, telemetry standards, time code standards, modulation techniques, and radio propagation. To reinforce understanding, each chapter includes exercises.

Rather than focusing on design specifics, which can change so rapidly with evolving technologies, the author centers his discussions on concepts and standards. This edition incorporates the latest standards, LabVIEW-based examples of telemetry and command processing, and simulations using multiSim and Commsim.

This book is a must-have reference to dry etching technology for semiconductors, which will enable engineers to develop new etching processes for further miniaturization and integration of semiconductor integrated circuits. The author describes the device manufacturing flow, and explains in which part of the flow dry etching is actually used. The content is designed as a practical guide for engineers working at chip makers, equipment suppliers and materials suppliers, and university students studying plasma, focusing on the topics they need most, such as detailed etching processes for each material (Si, SiO2, Metal etc) used in semiconductor devices, etching equipment used in manufacturing fabs, explanation of why a particular plasma source and gas chemistry are used for the etching of each material, and how to develop etching processes. The latest, key technologies are also described, such as 3D IC Etching, Dual Damascene Etching, Low-k Etching, Hi-k/Metal Gate Etching, FinFET Etching, Double Patterning etc.

This book presents original studies describing the latest research and developments in the area of reliability and systems engineering. It helps the reader identifying gaps in the current knowledge and presents fruitful areas for further research in the field. Among others, this book covers reliability measures, reliability assessment of multi-state systems, optimization of multi-state systems, continuous multi-state systems, new computational techniques applied to multi-state systems and probabilistic and non-probabilistic safety assessment.

This book is devoted to embedded systems (ESs), which can now be found in practically all fields of human activity. Embedded systems are essentially a special class of computing systems designed for monitoring and controlling objects of the physical world. The book begins by discussing the distinctive features of ESs, above all their cybernetic-physical character, and how they can be designed to deliver the required performance with a minimum amount of hardware. In turn, it presents a range of design methodologies. Considerable attention is paid to the hardware implementation of computational algorithms. It is shown that different parts of complex ESs could be implemented using models of finite state machines (FSMs). Also, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are very often used to implement different hardware accelerators in ESs. The book pays considerable attention to design methods for FPGA-based FSMs, before the closing section turns to programmable logic controllers widely used in industry. This book will be interesting and useful for students and postgraduates in the area of Computer Science, as well as for designers of embedded systems. In addition, it offers a good point of departure for creating embedded systems for various spheres of human activity.

A Unique, Cutting-Edge Approach to Optical Filter Design With more and more information being transmitted over fiber-optic lines, optical filtering has become crucial to the advanced functionality of today’s communications networks. Helping researchers and engineers keep pace with this rapidly evolving technology, this book presents digital processing techniques for optical filter design. This higher-level approach focuses on filter characteristics and enables readers to quickly calculate the filter response as well as tackle larger and more complex filters. The authors incorporate numerous theoretical and experimental results from the literature and discuss applications to a variety of systems—including the new wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, which is fast becoming the preferred method for system upgrade and expansion. Special features of this book include:

• The theory underlying various architectures that can approximate any filter function
• Filter design techniques applicable to a broad range of materials systems—from silica to fiber to microelectromechanical (MEM) systems
• Design examples relevant to filters for WDM systems and planar waveguide devices
• 250 figures as well as problem sets for use in graduate-level studies

The VHDL Reference: The essential guide for students and professionals working in computer hardware design and synthesis. The definitive guide to VHDL, this book combines a comprehensive reference of the VHDL syntax with tutorial and workshop materials that guide the reader through the principles of digital hardware design. The authors describe the concept of VHDL and VHDL-AMS for modelling and synthesis and explain how VHDL can be used for the design of digital systems. The CD-ROM features workshop and reference material to familiarise beginners with the use of VHDL for simulation and for synthesis. In-depth examples of VHDL construct are explained in compact and easy to follow form providing immediate help and answers to specific problems. The VHDL Reference is a highly accessible single source reference to the industry standard language for computer-aided electronic system design. It is not only an essential guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students in electrical engineering but also an indispensable aid to researchers and hardware designers and teachers using VHDL and logic synthesis. Features include:

• Accompanying CD-ROM version of the VHDL Reference including demonstration tools and workshop material covering language aspects for digital systems.
• Modelling tutorial featuring VHDL-AMS, the new standard for modelling and simulating mixed signal micro systems. Real-life examples enable the reader to test their knowledge and clarify their understanding of the concepts.
• Design workshop format taking the reader through an entire circuit design using an actual design problem, allowing beginners to put their VHDL skills into practice.
• A user friendly reference section providing in-depth coverage of the VHDL language for digital systems.
• Includes tools, on CD-ROM, for editing VHDL source files, simulating and synthesising VHDL models.

This book introduces Software Thermal Management (STM) as a means of reducing power consumption in a computing system in order to manage heat, improve component reliability and increase system safety. Readers will benefit from this pragmatic guide to the field of STM for embedded systems and its catalog of software power management techniques. Since thermal management is a key bottleneck in embedded systems design, this book focuses on root cause of heat in embedded systems: power. Since software has an enormous impact on power consumption in an embedded system, this book urges software engineers to manage heat effectively by understanding, categorizing and developing new ways to reduce static and dynamic power consumption. Whereas most books on thermal management describe mechanisms to remove heat, this book focuses on ways for software engineers to avoid generating heat in the first place.

This volume of the Lecture Notes in Mobility series contains papers written by speakers and poster presenters at the 21st International Forum on Advanced Microsystems for Automotive Applications (AMAA 2017) "Smart Systems Transforming the Automobile" that was held in Berlin, Germany in September 2017. The authors report about recent breakthroughs in electric and electronic components and systems, driver assistance and vehicle automation as well as safety and testing. Furthermore, legal aspects and impacts of connected and automated driving are covered. The target audience primarily comprises research experts and practitioners in industry and academia, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.

This research monograph focuses on the design of arithmetic circuits in Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (QCA). Using the fact that the 3-input majority gate is a primitive in QCA, the book sets out to discover hitherto unknown properties of majority logic in the context of arithmetic circuit designs. The pursuit for efficient adders in QCA takes two forms. One involves application of the new results in majority logic to existing adders. The second involves development of a custom adder for QCA technology. A QCA adder named as hybrid adder is proposed and it is shown that it outperforms existing multi-bit adders with respect to area and delay. The work is extended to the design of a low-complexity multiplier for signed numbers in QCA. Furthermore the book explores two aspects unique to QCA technology, namely thermal robustness and the role of interconnects. In addition, the book introduces the reader to QCA layout design and simulation using QCADesigner. Features & Benefits: This research-based book: *Introduces the reader to Quantum Dot Cellular Automata, an emerging nanotechnology. *Explores properties of majority logic. *Demonstrates application of the properties to design efficient arithmetic circuits. *Guides the reader towards layout design and simulation in QCADesigner.

Digital Hardware Testing presents realistic transistor-level fault models and testing methods for all types of circuits. The discussion details design-for-testability and built-in self-test methods, with coverage of boundary scan and emerging technologies such as partial scan, cross check, and circular self-test-path.

This book describes the state-of-the art of industrial and academic research in the architectural design of heterogeneous, multi/many-core processors. The authors describe methods and tools to enable next-generation embedded and high-performance heterogeneous processors to confront cost-effectively the inevitable variations by providing Dependable-Performance: correct functionality and timing guarantees throughout the expected lifetime of a platform under thermal, power, and energy constraints. Various aspects of the reliability problem are discussed, at both the circuit and architecture level, the intelligent selection of knobs and monitors in multicore platforms, and systematic design methodologies. The authors demonstrate how new techniques have been applied in real case studies from different applications domain and report on results and conclusions of those experiments. Enables readers to develop performance-dependable heterogeneous multi/many-core architectures Describes system software designs that support high performance dependability requirements Discusses and analyzes low level methodologies to tradeoff conflicting metrics, i.e. power, performance, reliability and thermal management Includes new application design guidelines to improve performance dependability

This book deals with the challenge of exploiting ambient vibrational energy which can be used to power small and low-power electronic devices, e.g. wireless sensor nodes. Generally, particularly for low voltage amplitudes, low-loss rectification is required to achieve high conversion efficiency. In the special case of piezoelectric energy harvesting, pulsed charge extraction has the potential to extract more power compared to a single rectifier. For this purpose, a fully autonomous CMOS integrated interface circuit for piezoelectric generators which fulfills these requirements is presented. Due to these key properties enabling universal usage, other CMOS designers working in the field of energy harvesting will be encouraged to use some of the shown structures for their own implementations. The book is unique in the sense that it highlights the design process from scratch to the final chip. Hence, it gives the designer a comprehensive guide of how to (i) setup an appropriate harvester model to get realistic simulation results, (ii) design the integrated circuits for low power operation, (iii) setup a laboratory measurement environment in order to extensively characterize the chip in combination with the real harvester and finally, (iv) interpret the simulation/measurement results in order to improve the chip performance. Since the dimensions of all devices (transistors, resistors etc.) are given, readers and other designers can easily re-use the presented circuit concepts.

This book is intended for systems engineers, hybrid and monolithic power amplifier designers, engineers involved in the development of CAD programs, academics, and industrial and goverment researchers. The book is devoted exclusively to high power GaAs FET amplifier design, covering the subject comprehensively, including FET design, circuit design, thermal and reliability analysis, and systems applications.

This book analyzes energy and reliability as major challenges faced by designers of computing frameworks in the nanometer technology regime. The authors describe the existing solutions to address these challenges and then reveal a new reconfigurable computing platform, which leverages high-density nanoscale memory for both data storage and computation to maximize the energy-efficiency and reliability. The energy and reliability benefits of this new paradigm are illustrated and the design challenges are discussed. Various hardware and software aspects of this exciting computing paradigm are described, particularly with respect to hardware-software co-designed frameworks, where the hardware unit can be reconfigured to mimic diverse application behavior. Finally, the energy-efficiency of the paradigm described is compared with other, well-known reconfigurable computing platforms.

From traditional techniques such as FSK, BPSK, QPSK and QAM to state-of-the-art techniques such as MSK, CPM and MHPM and more, this text covers the complete range of digital modulation methods. It discusses the historical background of digital modulation, and examines operation principles, symbol and bit error performance, and spectral characteristics. It also includes block diagrams and/or circuits of modulators, demodulators, carrier recovery, clock recovery and comparison with other schemes. In its comprehensive overview of digital modulation applications, it seeks to offer a practical understanding of conventional, fixed microwave terrestrial communications, mobile wireless, and mobile satellite communications.

This book opens the door to a new interesting and ambitious world of reversible and quantum computing research. It presents the state of the art required to travel around that world safely. Top world universities, companies and government institutions are in a race of developing new methodologies, algorithms and circuits on reversible logic, quantum logic, reversible and quantum computing and nano-technologies. In this book, twelve reversible logic synthesis methodologies are presented for the first time in a single literature with some new proposals. Also, the sequential reversible logic circuitries are discussed for the first time in a book. Reversible logic plays an important role in quantum computing. Any progress in the domain of reversible logic can be directly applied to quantum logic. One of the goals of this book is to show the application of reversible logic in quantum computing. A new implementation of wavelet and multiwavelet transforms using quantum computing is performed for this purpose. Researchers in academia or industry and graduate students, who work in logic synthesis, quantum computing, nano-technology, and low power VLSI circuit design, will be interested in this book.

This volume of the Lecture Notes in Mobility series contains papers written by speakers at the 22nd International Forum on Advanced Microsystems for Automotive Applications (AMAA 2018) "Smart Systems for Clean, Safe and Shared Road Vehicles" that was held in Berlin, Germany in September 2018. The authors report about recent breakthroughs in electric and electronic components and systems, driver assistance, vehicle automation and electrification as well as data, clouds and machine learning. Furthermore, innovation aspects and impacts of connected and automated driving are covered. The target audience primarily comprises research experts and practitioners in industry and academia, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.

This follow-up to the first volume presents an integrated survey of the most recent research, engineering development and commercial application of amorphous and microcrystalline semiconductor devices, with emphasis on materials properties and their relationship to performance. A complete guide to the past, present and future of these devices, and a reference on the state-of-the-art of amorphous and microcrystalline devices in modern large-area microelectronics.

This book serves as a single-source reference to Current Conveyors and their use in modern Analog Circuit Design. The authors describe the various types of current conveyors discovered over the past 45 years, details of all currently available, off-the-shelf integrated circuit current conveyors, and implementations of current conveyors using other, off-the-shelf IC building blocks. Coverage includes prominent bipolar/CMOS/Bi-CMOS architectures of current conveyors, as well as all varieties of starting from third generation current conveyors to universal current conveyors, their implementations and applications. *Describes all commercially available off-the-shelf IC current conveyors, as well as hardware implementations of current conveyors using other off-the-shelf ICs; * Describes numerous variants of current conveyors evolved over the past forty five years; * Describes a number of Bipolar/CMOS/Bi-CMOS architectures of current conveyors, along with their characteristic features; * Includes a comprehensive collection of over 400 application circuits using current conveyors; * Provides an exhaustive catalogue of current conveyor-based circuits for a variety of applications, including instrumentation amplifiers, precision rectifiers, simulated inductors, filters, sinusoidal oscillators, waveform generators, chaos generators, analog multipliers/dividers, memristive emulators and numerous others.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to spintronics-based computing for the next generation of ultra-low power/highly reliable logic. It will cover aspects from device to system-level, including magnetic memory cells, device modeling, hybrid circuit structure, design methodology, CAD tools, and technological integration methods. This book is accessible to a variety of readers and little or no background in magnetism and spin electronics are required to understand its content. The multidisciplinary team of expert authors from circuits, devices, computer architecture, CAD and system design reveal to readers the potential of spintronics nanodevices to reduce power consumption, improve reliability and enable new functionality.

This book provides techniques to tackle the design challenges raised by the increasing diversity and complexity of emerging, heterogeneous architectures for embedded systems. It describes an approach based on techniques from software engineering called aspect-oriented programming, which allow designers to control today's sophisticated design tool chains, while maintaining a single application source code. Readers are introduced to the basic concepts of an aspect-oriented, domain specific language that enables control of a wide range of compilation and synthesis tools in the partitioning and mapping of an application to a heterogeneous (and possibly multi-core) target architecture. Several examples are presented that illustrate the benefits of the approach developed for applications from avionics and digital signal processing. Using the aspect-oriented programming techniques presented in this book, developers can reuse extensive sections of their designs, while preserving the original application source-code, thus promoting developer productivity as well as architecture and performance portability. Describes an aspect-oriented approach for the compilation and synthesis of applications targeting heterogeneous embedded computing architectures. Includes examples using an integrated tool chain for compilation and synthesis. Provides validation and evaluation for targeted reconfigurable heterogeneous architectures. Enables design portability, given changing target devices* Allows developers to maintain a single application source code when targeting multiple architectures.

Formal Verification: An Essential Toolkit for Modern VLSI Design, Second Edition presents practical approaches for design and validation, with hands-on advice to help working engineers integrate these techniques into their work. Formal Verification (FV) enables a designer to directly analyze and mathematically explore the quality or other aspects of a Register Transfer Level (RTL) design without using simulations. This can reduce time spent validating designs and more quickly reach a final design for manufacturing. Building on a basic knowledge of SystemVerilog, this book demystifies FV and presents the practical applications that are bringing it into mainstream design and validation processes. New sections cover advanced techniques, and a new chapter, The Road To Formal Signoff, emphasizes techniques used when replacing simulation work with Formal Verification. After reading this book, readers will be prepared to introduce FV in their organization to effectively deploy FV techniques that increase design and validation productivity.