As Moore 's law continues to unfold, two important trends have recently emerged. First, the growth of chip capacity is translated into a corresponding increase of number of cores. Second, the parallelization of the computation and 3D integration technologies lead to distributed memory architectures.This book describes recent research that addresses urgent challenges in many-core architectures and application mapping. It addresses the architectural design of many core chips, memory and data management, power management, design and programming methodologies. It also describes how new techniques have been applied in various industrial case studies.

Wireless sensor networks have the potential to become the third wireless revolution after wireless voice networks in the 80s and wireless data networks in the late 90s. Unfortunately, radio power consumption is still a major bottleneck to the wide adoption of this technology. Different directions have been explored to minimize the radio consumption, but the major drawback of the proposed solutions is a reduced wireless link robustness. The primary goal of Architectures and Synthesizers for Ultra-low Power Fast Frequency-Hopping WSN Radios is to discuss, in detail, existing and new architectural and circuit level solutions for ultra-low power, robust, uni-directional and bi-directional radio links. Architectures and Synthesizers for Ultra-low Power Fast Frequency-Hopping WSN Radios guides the reader through the many system, circuit and technology trade-offs he will be facing in the design of communication systems for wireless sensor networks. Finally, this book, through different examples realized in both advanced CMOS and bipolar technologies opens a new path in the radio design, showing how radio link robustness can be guaranteed by techniques that were previously exclusively used in radio systems for middle or high end applications like Bluetooth and military communications while still minimizing the overall system power consumption.

Logic networks and automata are facets of digital systems. The change of the design of logic networks from skills and art into a scientific discipline was possible by the development of the underlying mathematical theory called the Switching Theory. The fundamentals of this theory come from the attempts towards an algebraic description of laws of thoughts presented in the works by George J. Boole and the works on logic by Augustus De Morgan. As often the case in engineering, when the importance of a problem and the need for solving it reach certain limits, the solutions are searched by many scholars in different parts of the word, simultaneously or at about the same time, however, quite independently and often unaware of the work by other scholars. The formulation and rise of Switching Theory is such an example. This book presents a brief account of the developments of Switching Theory and highlights some less known facts in the history of it. The readers will find the book a fresh look into the development of the field revealing how difficult it has been to arrive at many of the concepts that we now consider obvious . Researchers in the history or philosophy of computing will find this book a valuable source of information that complements the standard presentations of the topic.

Biopotential Readout Circuits for Portable Acquisition Systems describes one of the main building blocks of such miniaturized biomedical signal acquisition systems. The focus of this book is on the implementation of low-power and high-performance integrated circuit building blocks that can be used to extract biopotential signals from conventional biopotential electrodes. New instrumentation amplifier architectures are introduced and their design is described in detail. These amplifiers are used to implement complete acquisition demonstrator systems that are a stepping stone towards practical miniaturized and low-power systems.

This book introduces readers to the design of adaptive equalization solutions integrated in standard CMOS technology for high-speed serial links. Since continuous-time equalizers offer various advantages as an alternative to discrete-time equalizers at multi-gigabit rates, this book provides a detailed description of continuous-time adaptive equalizers design - both at transistor and system levels-, their main characteristics and performances. The authors begin with a complete review and analysis of the state of the art of equalizers for wireline applications, describing why they are necessary, their types, and their main applications. Next, theoretical fundamentals of continuous-time adaptive equalizers are explored. Then, new structures are proposed to implement the different building blocks of the adaptive equalizer: line equalizer, loop-filters, power comparator, etc. The authors demonstrate the design of a complete low-power, low-voltage, high-speed, continuous-time adaptive equalizer. Finally, a cost-effective CMOS receiver which includes the proposed continuous-time adaptive equalizer is designed for 1.25 Gb/s optical communications through 50-m length, 1-mm diameter plastic optical fiber (POF).

This book describes for readers technology used for effective sensing of our physical world and intelligent processing techniques for sensed information, which are essential to the success of Internet of Things (IoTs). The authors provide a multidisciplinary view of sensor technology from materials, process, circuits, and big data domains and showcase smart sensor systems in real applications including smart home, transportation, medical, environmental, agricultural, etc. Unlike earlier books on sensors, this book will provide a "global" view on smart sensors covering abstraction levels from device, circuit, systems, and algorithms. Profiles active research on smart sensors based on CMOS microelectronics; Describes applications of sensors and sensor systems in cyber physical systems, the social information infrastructure in our modern world; Includes coverage of a variety of related information technologies supporting the application of sensors; Discusses the integration of computation, networking, actuation, databases, and various sensors, in order to embed smart sensor systems into actual social systems.

During the last decade, many new concepts have been proposed for improving the performance of power rectifiers and transistors. The results of this research are dispersed in the technical literature among journal articles and abstracts of conferences. Consequently, the information is not readily available to researchers and practicing engineers in the power device community. There is no cohesive treatment of the ideas to provide an assessment of the relative merits of the ideas.

Advanced Power Rectifier Concepts provides an in-depth treatment of the physics of operation of advanced power rectifiers. Analytical models for explaining the operation of all the advanced power rectifier devices will be developed. The results off numerical simulations will be provided to provide additional insight into the device physics and validate the analytical models. The results of two-dimensional simulations will be provided to corroborate the analytical models and provide greater insight into the device operation.

This book is addressed to newcomers to error control coding (ECC), making the subject easy to understand and to apply in a variety of cases. The book begins by presenting in a detailed, step-by-step manner the plethora of parts an ECC system has and the way they interact to achieve the performance required. Contrary to the more abstract and formal approach followed in most books on this topic, this book is unique in that all of the concepts, methods, techniques and algorithms are introduced by way of examples. Thus, the book is almost a workbook, and therefore very suitable for self-study. Readers are encouraged to take an active role while reading, performing calculations as chapters' progress. Moreover, to reinforce the learning process, many of the topics introduced in the book (Galois fields, Extended Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, interleaving, erasure correction, etc.) are presented in various parts of the book in different ways or contexts. Offers a practical guide to error control coding, accessible to readers with varying backgrounds; Provides newcomers with a sound foundation in error control coding, using a select few topics considered by the author fundamental from an engineering point of view; Presents material with minimal mathematics; Motivates carefully concepts, methods and algorithms making clear the idea behind the conditions for the code to work.

This volume gives the latest developments in on the mechanisms of cancer cell resistance to apoptotic stimuli, which eventually result in cancer progression and metastasis. One of the main challenges in cancer research is to develop new therapies to combat resistant tumors. The development of new effective therapies will be dependent on delineating the biochemical, molecular, and genetic mechanisms that regulate tumor cell resistance to cytotoxic drug-induced apoptosis. These mechanisms should reveal gene products that directly regulate resistance in order to develop new drugs that target these resistance factors and such new drugs may either be selective or common to various cancers. If successful, new drugs may not be toxic and may be used effectively in combination with subtoxic conventional drugs to achieve synergy and to reverse tumor cell resistance. The research developments presented in this book can be translated to produce better clinical responses to resistant tumors.

This book includes a selection of the best contributions to the Forum on Specification and Design Languages held in 2005 (FDL'05). It provides detailed insights into recent works dealing with a large spectrum of issues in system-on-chip design. All the chapters have been carefully revised and extended to offer up-to-date information. They also provide seeds for further researches and developments in the field of heterogeneous systems-on-chip design.

Many and ever more mobile users wish to enjoy a variety of multimedia services, in very diverse geographical environments. The growing number of communication options within and across wireless standards is accommodating the growing volume and heterogeneity in wireless wishes. On the other hand, advancement in radio technologies opening much more flexibility, a.o. through Software Defined Radios, opens up the possibility to realize mobile devices featuring multi-mode options at low cost and interesting form factors.

It is crucial to manage the new degrees of freedom opened up in radios and standards in a smart way, such that the required service is offered at satisfactory quality as efficiently as possible. Efficiency in energy consumption is clearly primordial for battery powered mobile terminals specifically, and in the context of growing ecological concerns in a broader context. Moreover, efficient usage of the spectrum is a growing prerequisite for wireless systems, and coexistence of different standards puts overall throughput at risk.

The management of flexibility risks bringing about intolerable complexity and hamper the desired agility. A systematic approach, consisting of anticipative preparing for smooth operation, allows mastering this challenge. Case studies show that already today, this approach enables smart operation of radios realizing impressive efficiency gains without hampering Quality-of-Service. In the future wireless communication scenes will be able to profit form the opening of the spectrum. Even smarter and cognitive behavior will become possible and essential.

High-speed, power-efficient analog integrated circuits can be used as standalone devices or to interface modern digital signal processors and micro-controllers in various applications, including multimedia, communication, instrumentation, and control systems. New architectures and low device geometry of complementary metaloxidesemiconductor (CMOS) technologies have accelerated the movement toward system on a chip design, which merges analog circuits with digital, and radio-frequency components.

This book presents a new set of embedded system design techniques called multidimensional data flow, which combine the various benefits offered by existing methodologies such as block-based system design, high-level simulation, system analysis and polyhedral optimization. It describes a novel architecture for efficient and flexible high-speed communication in hardware that can be used both in manual and automatic system design and that offers various design alternatives, balancing achievable throughput with required hardware size. This book demonstrates multidimensional data flow by showing its potential for modeling, analysis, and synthesis of complex image processing applications. These applications are presented in terms of their fundamental properties and resulting design constraints. Coverage includes a discussion of how far the latter can be met better by multidimensional data flow than alternative approaches. Based on these results, the book explains the principles of fine-grained system level analysis and high-speed communication synthesis. Additionally, an extensive review of related techniques is given in order to show their relation to multidimensional data flow.

This book will explain how to verify SoC logic designs using "formal" and "semi-formal" verification techniques. The critical issue to be addressed is whether the functionality of the design is the one that the designers intended. Simulation has been used for checking the correctness of SoC designs (as in "functional" verification), but many subtle design errors cannot be caught by simulation. Recently, formal verification, giving mathematical proof of the correctness of designs, has been getting much more attention. So far, most of the books on formal verification target the register transfer level (RTL) or lower levels of design. For higher design productivity, it is essential to debug designs as early as possible. That is, designs should be completely verified at very abstracted design levels (higher than RTL). This book covers all aspects of high-level formal and semi-formal verification techniques for system level designs.
- First book that covers all aspects of formal and semi-formal, high-level (higher than RTL) design verification targeting SoC designs.
- Formal verification of high-level designs (RTL or higher).
- Verification techniques are discussed with associated system-level design methodology.

More than 1.3 billion people worldwide lack access to electricity. Although extension of the electricity grid remains the preferred mode of electrification, off-grid electrification can offer a solution to such cases. "Rural Electrification through Decentralised Off-grid Systems in Developing Countries" provides a review of rural electrification experiences with an emphasis on off-grid electrification and presents business-related aspects including participatory arrangements, financing, and regulatory governance.

Organized in three parts, "Rural Electrification through Decentralised Off-grid Systems in Developing Countries" provides comprehensive coverage and state-of-the art reviews which appraise the reader of the latest trend in the thinking. The first part presents the background information on electricity access, discusses the developmental implications of lack of electricity infrastructure and provides a review of alternative off-grid technologies. The second part presents a review of experiences from various regions (South Asia, China, Africa, South East Asia and South America). Finally, the third part deals with business dimensions and covers participatory business models, funding challenges for electrification and regulatory and governance issues.

Based on the research carried out under the EPSRC/ DfID funded research grant for off-grid electrification in South Asia, "Rural Electrification through Decentralised Off-grid Systems in Developing Countries" provides a multi-disciplinary perspective of the rural electrification challenge through off-grid systems. Providing a practical introduction for students, this is also a key reference for engineers and governing bodies working with off-grid electrification.

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This book provides an invaluable primer on the techniques utilized in the design of low power digital semiconductor devices. Readers will benefit from the hands-on approach which starts form the ground-up, explaining with basic examples what power is, how it is measured and how it impacts on the design process of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The authors use both the Unified Power Format (UPF) and Common Power Format (CPF) to describe in detail the power intent for an ASIC and then guide readers through a variety of architectural and implementation techniques that will help meet the power intent. From analyzing system power consumption, to techniques that can be employed in a low power design, to a detailed description of two alternate standards for capturing the power directives at various phases of the design, this book is filled with information that will give ASIC designers a competitive edge in low-power design.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research on memristors, memcapacitors and, meminductors. In addition to an historical overview of the research in this area, coverage includes the theory behind memristive circuits, as well as memcapacitance, and meminductance. Details are shown for recent applications of memristors for resistive random access memories, neuromorphic systems and hybrid CMOS/memristor circuits. Methods for the simulation of memristors are demonstrated and an introduction to neuromorphic modeling is provided.

This book is the second of two volumes addressing the design challenges associated with new generations of semiconductor technology. The various chapters are compiled from tutorials presented at workshops in recent years by prominent authors from all over the world. Technology, productivity and quality are the main aspects under consideration to establish the major requirements for the design and test of upcoming systems on a chip.

This book describes a new type of passive electronic components, called fractal elements, from a theoretical and practical point of view. The authors discuss in detail the physical implementation and design of fractal devices for application in fractional-order signal processing and systems. The concepts of fractals and fractal signals are explained, as well as the fundamentals of fractional calculus. Several implementations of fractional impedances are discussed, along with comparison of their performance characteristics. Details of design, schematics, fundamental techniques and implementation of RC-based fractal elements are provided.

Power consumption becomes the most important design goal in a wide range of electronic systems. There are two driving forces towards this trend: continuing device scaling and ever increasing demand of higher computing power. First, device scaling continues to satisfy Moore's law via a conventional way of scaling (More Moore) and a new way of exploiting the vertical integration (More than Moore). Second, mobile and IT convergence requires more computing power on the silicon chip than ever. Cell phones are now evolving towards mobile PC. PCs and data centers are becoming commodities in house and a must in industry. Both supply enabled by device scaling and demand triggered by the convergence trend realize more computation on chip (via multi-core, integration of diverse functionalities on mobile SoCs, etc.) and finally more power consumption incurring power-related issues and constraints.

"Energy-Aware System Design: Algorithms and Architectures" provides state-of-the-art ideas for low power design methods from circuit, architecture to software level andoffers design case studies in three fast growing areas of mobile storage, biomedical and security.

Important topics and features:

- Describes very recent advanced issues and methods for energy-aware design at each design level from circuit andarchitecture toalgorithm level, and also covering important blocks including low power main memory subsystem and on-chip network at architecture level

- Explains efficient power conversion and delivery which is becoming important as heterogeneous power sources are adopted for digital and non-digital parts

- Investigates 3D die stacking emphasizing temperature awareness for better perspective on energy efficiency

- Presents three practical energy-aware design case studies; novel storage device (e.g., solid state disk), biomedical electronics (e.g., cochlear and retina implants), and wireless surveillance camera systems.

Researchers and engineers in the field of hardware and software design will find this book an excellent starting point to catch up with the state-of-the-art ideas of low power design.

Nanorobots represent a nanoscale device where proteins such as DNA, carbon nanotubes could act as motors, mechanical joints, transmission elements, or sensors. When these different components were assembled together they can form nanorobots with multi-degree-of-freedom, able to apply forces and manipulate objects in the nanoscale world. Design, Modeling and Characterization of Bio-Nanorobotic Systems investigates the design, assembly, simulation, and prototyping of biological and artificial molecular structures with the goal of implementing their internal nanoscale movements within nanorobotic systems in an optimized manner.

Analog Circuit Design contains the contribution of 18 tutorials of the 18th workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design. Each part discusses a specific to-date topic on new and valuable design ideas in the area of analog circuit design. Each part is presented by six experts in that field and state of the art information is shared and overviewed. This book is number 18 in this successful series of Analog Circuit Design, providing valuable information and excellent overviews of: Smart Data Converters: Chaired by Prof. Arthur van Roermund, Eindhoven University of Technology, Filters on Chip: Chaired by Herman Casier, AMI Semiconductor Fellow, Multimode Transmitters: Chaired by Prof. M. Steyaert, Catholic University Leuven, Analog Circuit Design is an essential reference source for analog circuit designers and researchers wishing to keep abreast with the latest development in the field. The tutorial coverage also makes it suitable for use in an advanced design.

This book describes a new way to design and utilize Instrumentation Amplifiers (IAs) by taking advantages of the current-mode (CM) approach. For the first time, all different topologies of CMIAs are discussed and compared, providing a single-source reference for instrumentation and measurement experts who want to choose a topology for a specific application. The authors also explain major challenges in designing CMIAs, so the book can be useful for anyone studying instrumentation amplifiers, and even other analog circuits. Coverage also includes various CM signal processing techniques employed in CMIAs, and applications of the CMIAs in biomedical and data acquisition are demonstrated.

At 90 nm, wires account for nearly 75% of the total delay in a circuit. Even more insidious, however, is that among nearly 40% of these nets, more than 50% of their total net capacitance are attributed to the cross-coupling capacitance between neighboring signals. At this point a new design and optimization paradigm based on real wires is required. Nanometer routers must prevent and correct these effects on-the-fly in order to reach timing closure.

This book provides an overview of automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) and introduces novel techniques to complement classical ATPG, based on Boolean Satisfiability (SAT). A fast and highly fault efficient SAT-based ATPG framework is presented which is also able to generate high-quality delay tests such as robust path delay tests, as well as tests with long propagation paths to detect small delay defects.

The aim of the techniques and methodologies presented in this book is to improve SAT-based ATPG, in order to make it applicable in industrial practice. Readers will learn to improve the performance and robustness of the overall test generation process, so that the ATPG algorithm reliably will generate test patterns for most targeted faults in acceptable run time to meet the high fault coverage demands of industry. The techniques and improvements presented in this book provide the following advantages:

Provides a comprehensive introduction to test generation and Boolean Satisfiability (SAT);Describes a highly fault efficient SAT-based ATPG framework; Introduces circuit-oriented SAT solving techniques, which make use of structural information and are able to accelerate the search process significantly;Provides SAT formulations for the prevalent delay faults models, in addition to the classical stuck-at fault model;Includes an industrial perspective on the state-of-the-art in the testing, along with SAT; two topics typically distinguished from each other.

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