EUROGRAPHICS workshops on Graphics hardware have now become an established forum for an exchange of information con cerning the latest developments in this field of growing importance. The first workshop took place during EG'86 in Lisbon. All parti cipants in this event considered it a very rewarding workshop to be repeated at future EG conferences. This view was reinforced at the EG'87 Hardware Workshop in Amsterdam which firmly esta blished the need for and a high interest in such a colloquium of technical discussion in this specialist area within the annual EG conference. The third EG Hardware Workshop took place in Nice in 1988 and this volume is a record of the fourth workshop at EG'89 in Hamburg. The material in this book contains papers representing a com prehensive record of the contributions to the 1989 workshop. The first part considers Algorithms and Architectures of graphics systems. These papers discuss the broader issues of system design, without necessarily raising issues concerning the details of the implementation. The second part on Systems describes hardware solutions and realisations of machines dedicated to graphics processing. Many of these contributions make important references to algorithmic and architectural issues as well, but there is now a greater emphasis on realisation. Indeed many VLSI designs are described.

This volume on Advanced Electronic Technologies and Systems based on Low Dimensional Quantum Devices closes a three years series of NATO -AS ' s. The first year was focused on the fundamental properties and applications. The second year was devoted to Devices Based on Low-Dimensional Semiconductor Structures. The third year is covering Systems Based on Low-Dimensional Quantum Semiconductor Devices. The three volumes containing the lectures given at the three successive NATO -ASI's constitute a complete review on the latest advances in semiconductor Science and Technology from the methods of fabrication of the quantum structures through the fundamental physics am basic knowledge of properties and projection of performances to the technology of devices and systems. In the first volume: " Fabrication, Properties and Application of Low Dimensional Semiconductors" are described the practical ways in which quantum structures are produced, the present status of the technology, difficulties encountered, and advances to be expected. The basic theory of Quantum Wells, Double Quantum Wells and Superlattices is introduced and the fundamental aspects of their optical properties are presented. The effect of reduction of dimensionality on lattice dynamics of quantum structures is also discussed. In the second volume: " Devices Based on Low Dimensional Structures" the fundamentals of quantum structures and devices in the two major fields: Electro-Optical Devices and Pseudomorphic High Eectron Mobility Transistors are extensively discussed."

Find out which technologies enable the Grid and how to employ them successfully!

This invaluable text provides a complete, clear, systematic, and practical understanding of the technologies that enable the Grid. The authors outline all the components necessary to create a Grid infrastructure that enables support for a range of wide-area distributed applications. "The Grid: Core Technologies" takes a pragmatic approach with numerous practical examples of software in context. It describes the middleware components of the Grid step-by-step, and gives hands-on advice on designing and building a Grid environment with the Globus Toolkit, as well as writing applications.

"The Grid: Core Technologies: " Provides a solid and up-to-date introduction to the technologies that underpin the Grid. Contains a systematic explanation of the Grid, including its infrastructure, basic services, job management, user interaction, and applications. Explains in detail OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture), Web Services technologies (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), and Grid Monitoring. Covers Web portal-based tools such as the Java CoG, GridPort, GridSphere, and JSR 168 Portlets. Tackles hot topics such as WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework), the Semantic Grid, the Grid Security Infrastructure, and Workflow systems. Offers practical examples to enhance the understanding and use of Grid components and the associated tools.

This rich resource will be essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students in computing and engineering departments, IT professionals in distributed computing, as well as Grid end users such as physicists, statisticians, biologists and chemists.

This book is the third in a series of books collecting the best papers from the three main regional conferences on electronic system design languages, HDLCon in the United States, APCHDL in Asia-Pacific and FDL in Europe. Being APCHDL bi-annual, this book presents a selection of papers from HDLCon'Ol and FDL'OI. HDLCon is the premier HDL event in the United States. It originated in 1999 from the merging of the International Verilog Conference and the Spring VHDL User's Forum. The scope of the conference expanded from specialized languages such as VHDL and Verilog to general purpose languages such as C++ and Java. In 2001 it was held in February in Santa Clara, CA. Presentations from design engineers are technical in nature, reflecting real life experiences in using HDLs. EDA vendors presentations show what is available - and what is planned-for design tools that utilize HDLs, such as simulation and synthesis tools. The Forum on Design Languages (FDL) is the European forum to exchange experiences and learn of new trends, in the application of languages and the associated design methods and tools, to design complex electronic systems. FDL'OI was held in Lyon, France, around seven interrelated workshops, Hardware Description Languages, Analog and Mixed signal Specification, C/C++ HW/SW Specification and Design, Design Environments & Languages, Real-Time specification for embedded Systems, Architecture Modeling and Reuse and System Specification & Design Languages.

It is now possible to gain competitive advantages based on consolidated R/3 system implementations. One of the most important optimisation aspects is a more consistent process integration in order to bring about fast, secure and cost effective business processes. This approach inevitably leads to Workflow Management and for SAP users to SAP(r) WebFlow(r). This book introduces the topic of Workflow Management, gives an overview of the technical possibilities of SAP(r) WebFlow(r) and allows the reader to assess SAP workflow project risks and costs/benefits based on real life examples. Check lists and technical hints not only aid the reader in evaluating potential projects but also in the management of real life workflow project engineering.

Evolvable hardware (EHW) refers to hardware whose architecture/structure and functions change dynamically and autonomously in order to improve its performance in carrying out tasks. The only single resource presenting both the fundamentals, and the latest advances in the field, this book teaches the basics of reconfigurable devices, why they are necessary and how they are designed.

Covers in detail promising solutions at the device, circuit, and architecture levels of abstraction after first explaining the sensitivity of the various MOS leakage sources to these conditions from the first principles.

Also treated are the resulting effects so the reader understands the effectiveness of leakage power reduction solutions under these different conditions.

Case studies supply real-world examples that reap the benefits of leakage power reduction solutions as the book highlights different device design choices that exist to mitigate increases in the leakage components as technology scales.

This book deals with the analysis and design of CMOS current-mode circuits for data communications. CMOS current-mode sampled-data networks, i.e. switched-current circuits, are excluded. Major subjects covered in the book include: a critical comparison of voltage-mode and current-mode circuits; the building blocks of current-mode circuits: design techniques; modeling of wire channels, electrical signaling for Gbps data communications; ESD protection for current-mode circuits and more. This book will appeal to IC design engineers, hardware system engineers and others.

Pervasive healthcare is the conceptual system of providing healthcare to anyone, at anytime, and anywhere by removing restraints of time and location while increasing both the coverage and the quality of healthcare. Pervasive Healthcare Computing is at the forefront of this research, and presents the ways in which mobile and wireless technologies can be used to implement the vision of pervasive healthcare.

This vision includes prevention, healthcare maintenance and checkups; short-term monitoring (home healthcare), long-term monitoring (nursing home), and personalized healthcare monitoring; and incidence detection and management, emergency intervention, transportation and treatment. The pervasive healthcare applications include intelligent emergency management system, pervasive healthcare data access, and ubiquitous mobile telemedicine.

Pervasive Healthcare Computing includes the treatment of several new wireless technologies and the ways in which they will implement the vision of pervasive healthcare.

Evolvable Hardware (EHW) has emerged as a sub-domain of artificial evolution represented by a design methodology (consortium of methods) involving the application of Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) to the synthesis of digital and analogue electronic circuits and systems. Nevertheless, the most benefit for the society and indeed most revolutionizing application of EA is its hardware implementation leading to the EHW. These new EA based methodologies led to a new type of machines that is evolved to attain a desired behaviour, which means they have a behavioural computational intelligence. EHW is a special case of the adaptive hardware, namely being strongly related to the Adaptive Systems (AS) and the Adaptive Hardware (AH). The book presents a careful selection of the field that very well reflects the breadth of this high technology and its terminology and applications in context of the AS/AH. The harmonious symbiosis of the engineering approach and the accurate scientific methodology features the aspects of highly relevant and practical design principles governing the development of EHW and its connections with AS/AH. This book is both attractive and useful for everybody interested in the design and analysis of EHW in context of AS/AH and implementation of real time adaptive hardware hybrid intelligent systems.

From the Foreword:

..".the presentation of real-time scheduling is probably the best in terms of clarity I have ever read in the professional literature. Easy to understand, which is important for busy professionals keen to acquire (or refresh) new knowledge without being bogged down in a convoluted narrative and an excessive detail overload. The authors managed to largely avoid theoretical-only presentation of the subject, which frequently affects books on operating systems.

... an indispensable resource] to gain a thorough understanding of the real-time systems from the operating systems perspective, and to stay up to date with the recent trends and actual developments of the open-source real-time operating systems."

-Richard Zurawski, ISA Group, San Francisco, California, USA

Real-time embedded systems are integral to the global technological and social space, but references still rarely offer professionals the sufficient mix of theory and practical examples required to meet intensive economic, safety, and other demands on system development. Similarly, instructors have lacked a resource to help students fully understand the field. The information was out there, though often at the abstract level, fragmented and scattered throughout literature from different engineering disciplines and computing sciences.

Accounting for readers' varying practical needs and experience levels, Real Time Embedded Systems: Open-Source Operating Systems Perspective offers a holistic overview from the operating-systems perspective. It provides a long-awaited reference on real-time operating systems and their almost boundless application potential in the embedded system domain.

Balancing the already abundant coverage of operating systems with the largely ignored real-time aspects, or "physicality," the authors analyze several realistic case studies to introduce vital theoretical material. They also discuss popular open-source operating systems-Linux and FreRTOS, in particular-to help embedded-system designers identify the benefits and weaknesses in deciding whether or not to adopt more traditional, less powerful, techniques for a project.

The 9th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing, held in Phuket Thailand on August 6 - 8, 2008 is aimed at bringing together researchers and scientist, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science, and to share ideas and information in a meaningful way. This publication captures 20 of the conference's most promising papers, and we impatiently await the important contributions that we know these authors will bring to the field.

Design reuse is not just a topic of research but a real industrial necessity in the microelectronic domain and thus driving the competitiveness of relevant areas like for example telecommunication or automotive. Most companies have already dedicated a department or a central unit that transfer design reuse into reality. All main EDA conferences include a track to the topic, and even specific conferences have been established in this area, both in the USA and in Europe. Virtual Components Design and Reuse presents a selection of articles giving a mature and consolidated perspective to design reuse from different points of view. The authors stem from all relevant areas: research and academia, IP providers, EDA vendors and industry. Some classical topics in design reuse, like specification and generation of components, IP retrieval and cataloguing or interface customisation, are revisited and discussed in depth. Moreover, new hot topics are presented, among them IP quality, platform-based reuse, software IP, IP security, business models for design reuse, and major initiatives like the MEDEA EDA Roadmap.

SystemC Kernel Extensions for Heterogeneous System Modeling is a result of an almost two year endeavour on our part to understand how SystemC can be made useful for system level modeling at higher levels of abstraction. Making it a truly heterogeneous modeling language and platform, for hardware/software co-design as well as complex embedded hardware designs has been our focus in the work reported in this book.

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 benefits stemming from the adoption of the system level of abstraction. Research efforts are already addressing this issue.

This monograph provides a state-of-the-art overview of the current validation and test techniques by covering all aspects of the subject including:

• modeling of bugs and defects;
• stimulus generation for validation and test purposes (including timing errors;
• design for testability.

In its updated second edition, this book has been extensively revised on a chapter by chapter basis. The book accurately reflects the syntax and semantic changes to the SystemVerilog language standard, making it an essential reference for systems professionals who need the latest version information. In addition, the second edition features a new chapter explaining the SystemVerilog "packages," a new appendix that summarizes the synthesis guidelines presented throughout the book, and all of the code examples have been updated to the final syntax and rerun using the latest version of the Synopsys, Mentor, and Cadance tools.

Interconnect has become the dominating factor in determining system performance in nanometer technologies. This book is dedicated to this important subject. The primary purpose of this monograph is to provide insight and intuition into layout analysis and optimization for interconnect in high speed, high complexity integrated circuits.

In this monograph, the effects of wire size, spacing between wires, wire length, coupling length, load capacitance, rise time of the inputs, place of overlap (near driver or receiver side), frequency, shields, direction of the signals, and wire width for both the aggressors and the victim wires on system performance and reliability is thoroughly investigated. Also, parameters like driver strength has been considered as several recent studies considered the simultaneous device and interconnect sizing. Crosstalk noise, as well as the impact of coupling on aggressor delay is analyzed. The pulse width of the crosstalk noise, which is of similar importance for circuit performance as the peak amplitude, is also analyzed. We have considered more parameters that can affect the signal integrity and presented practical intensive simulation results.

This book brings together a wealth of information previously scattered throughout the literature, presenting a range of CAD algorithms and techniques for synthesizing and optimizing interconnect. The practical aspects of the algorithms and models are explained with sufficient detail.

It deeply investigates the most two effective parameters in layout optimization, spacing and shield insertion, that can affect both capacitive and inductive noise. Noise models needed for layouts with multi-layer multi-crosscoupling segments are investigated. Different post-layout optimization techniques are explained with complexity analysis and benchmarks tests are provided.

This book carefully details design tools and techniques for realizing low power and energy efficiency in a highly productive design methodology.

Important topics include:
- Microarchitectural techniques to reduce energy per operation
- Power reduction with timing slack from pipelining
- Analysis of the benefits of using multiple supply and threshold voltages
- Placement techniques for multiple supply voltages
- Verification for multiple voltage domains
- Improved algorithms for gate sizing, and assignment of supply and threshold voltages
- Power gating design automation to reduce leakage
- Relationships among tatistical timing, power analysis, and parametric yield optimization

Design examples illustrate that these techniques can improve energy efficiency by two to three times.

In 2007 The Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference celebrated its tenth anniversary. As a tribute to the chip and system-level design and design technology community, this book presents a compilation of the three most influential papers of each year. This provides an excellent historical overview of the evolution of a domain that contributed substantially to the growth and competitiveness of the circuit electronics and systems industry.

Hardware Software Co-Design of a Multimedia SOC Platform is one of the first of its kinds to provide a comprehensive overview of the design and implementation of the hardware and software of an SoC platform for multimedia applications. Topics covered in this book range from system level design methodology, multimedia algorithm implementation, a sub-word parallel, single-instruction-multiple data (SIMD) processor design, and its virtual platform implementation, to the development of an SIMD parallel compiler as well as a real-time operating system (RTOS). Hardware Software Co-Design of a Multimedia SOC Platform is written for practitioner engineers and technical managers who want to gain first hand knowledge about the hardware-software design process of an SoC platform. It offers both tutorial-like details to help readers become familiar with a diverse range of subjects, and in-depth analysis for advanced readers to pursue further.

Jump start your journey with electronics! If you've thought about getting into electronics, but don't know where to start, this book gives you the information you need. Starting with the basics of electricity and circuits, you'll be introduced to digital electronics and microcontrollers, capacitors and inductors, and amplification circuits - all while gaining the basic tools and information you need to start working with low-power electronics. Electronics for Beginners walks the fine line of focusing on projects-based learning, while still keeping electronics front and center. You'll learn the mathematics of circuits in an uncomplicated fashion and see how schematics map on to actual breadboards. Written for the absolute beginner, this book steers clear of being too math heavy, giving readers the key information they need to get started on their electronics journey. What You'll Learn Review the basic "patterns" of resistor usage-pull up, pull down, voltage divider, and current limiter Understand the requirements for circuits and how they are put together Read and differentiate what various parts of the schematics do Decide what considerations to take when choosing components Use all battery-powered circuits, so projects are safe Who This Book Is For Makers, students, and beginners of any age interested in getting started with electronics.

This book discusses practical applications of reliability and statistical methods and techniques in various disciplines, using machine learning, artificial intelligence, optimization, and other computation methods. Bringing together research from international experts, each chapter aims to cover both methods and practical aspects on reliability or statistical computations with emphasis on applications. 5G and IoT are set to generate an estimated 1 billion terabytes of data by 2025 and companies continue to search for new techniques and tools that can help them practice data collection effectively in promoting their business. This book explores the era of big data through reliability and statistical computing, showcasing how almost all applications in our daily life have experienced a dramatic shift in the past two decades to a truly global industry. Including numerous illustrations and worked examples, the book is of interest to researchers, practicing engineers, and postgraduate students in the fields of reliability engineering, statistical computing, and machine learning.

The year 2009 celebrates the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th - niversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species.If this makes 2009 a special year for the research community working in biology and evolution, the ?eld of evolutionary computation (EC) also shares the same excitement. EC techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired planning and optimi- tion methods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their e?ciency and simple underlying principles, these methods can be used in the context of problem solving, optimization, and machine learning. A large and ever-increasing number of researchers and professionals make use of EC te- niques in various application domains. ThisvolumepresentsacarefulselectionofrelevantECapplicationscombined with a thorough examination of the techniques used in EC. The papers in the volume illustrate the current state of the art in the application of EC and can help and inspire researchers and professionals to develop e?cient EC methods for design and problem solving.

A comprehensive introduction to ICA for students and practitioners

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is one of the most exciting new topics in fields such as neural networks, advanced statistics, and signal processing. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive introduction to this new technique complete with the fundamental mathematical background needed to understand and utilize it. It offers a general overview of the basics of ICA, important solutions and algorithms, and in-depth coverage of new applications in image processing, telecommunications, audio signal processing, and more.

Independent Component Analysis is divided into four sections that cover:

• General mathematical concepts utilized in the book
• The basic ICA model and its solution
• Various extensions of the basic ICA model
• Real-world applications for ICA models

Authors Hyvärinen, Karhunen, and Oja are well known for their contributions to the development of ICA and here cover all the relevant theory, new algorithms, and applications in various fields. Researchers, students, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines will find this accessible volume both helpful and informative.

As well as conveying a message in words and sounds, the speech signal carries information about the speaker's own anatomy, physiology, linguistic experience and mental state. These speaker characteristics are found in speech at all levels of description: from the spectral information in the sounds to the choice of words and utterances themselves.

This volume and its companion volume, LNAI 4441, constitute a state-of-the-art survey for the field of speaker classification. They approach the following questions: What characteristics of the speaker become manifest in his or her voice and speaking behavior? Which of them can be inferred from analyzing the acoustic realizations? What can this information be used for? Which methods are the most suitable for diversified problems in this area of research? How should the quality of the results be evaluated?

The 19 contributions to this volume comprise general and overview-like articles that are organized in topical sections on fundamentals, characteristics, applications, methods and features, as well as evaluation.