This book presents the methodologies and for embedded systems design, using field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices, for the most modern applications. Coverage includes state-of-the-art research from academia and industry on a wide range of topics, including applications, advanced electronic design automation (EDA), novel system architectures, embedded processors, arithmetic, and dynamic reconfiguration.

For the first time, this up-to-date text combines the main issues of the hardware description language VHDL-AMS aimed at model representation of mixed-signal circuits and systems, characterization methods and tools for the extraction of model parameters, and modelling methodologies for accurate high-level behavioural models.

This book provides an introduction to the emerging area of "Brain-Machine Interfaces," with emphasis on the operation and practical design aspects. The book will help both electrical & bioengineers as well as neuroscience investigators to learn about the next generation brain-machine interfaces. The comprehensive review and design analysis will be very helpful for researchers who are new to this area or interested in the study of the brain. The in-depth discussion of practical design issues especially in animal experiments will also be valuable for experienced researchers.

Future Data and Knowledge Base Systems will require new functionalities: richer data modelling capabilities, more powerful query languages, and new concepts of query answers. Future query languages will include functionalities such as hypothetical reasoning, abductive reasoning, modal reasoning, and metareasoning, involving knowledge and belief. Intentional answers will lead to cooperative query answering in which the answer to a query takes into consideration user's expectations. Non-classical logic plays an important role in this book for the formalization of new queries and new answers. It is shown how logic permits precise definitions for concepts like cooperative answers, subjective queries, or reliable sources of information, and gives a precise framework for reasoning about these complex concepts. It is worth noting that advances in knowledge management are not just an application domain for existing results in logic, but also require new developments in logic. The book is organized into 10 chapters which cover the areas of cooperative query answering (in the first three chapters), metareasoning and abductive reasoning (chapters 5 to 7), and, finally, hypothetical and subjunctive reasoning (last three chapters).

This book introduces readers to alternative approaches to designing efficient embedded systems using unconventional number systems. The authors describe various systems that can be used for designing efficient embedded and application-specific processors, such as Residue Number System, Logarithmic Number System, Redundant Binary Number System Double-Base Number System, Decimal Floating Point Number System and Continuous Valued Number System. Readers will learn the strategies and trade-offs of using unconventional number systems in application-specific processors and be able to apply and design appropriate arithmetic operations from these number systems to boost the performance of digital systems.

Networks on Chip presents a variety of topics, problems and approaches with the common theme to systematically organize the on-chip communication in the form of a regular, shared communication network on chip, an NoC for short.

As the number of processor cores and IP blocks integrated on a single chip is steadily growing, a systematic approach to design the communication infrastructure becomes necessary. Different variants of packed switched on-chip networks have been proposed by several groups during the past two years. This book summarizes the state of the art of these efforts and discusses the major issues from the physical integration to architecture to operating systems and application interfaces. It also provides a guideline and vision about the direction this field is moving to. Moreover, the book outlines the consequences of adopting design platforms based on packet switched network. The consequences may in fact be far reaching because many of the topics of distributed systems, distributed real-time systems, fault tolerant systems, parallel computer architecture, parallel programming as well as traditional system-on-chip issues will appear relevant but within the constraints of a single chip VLSI implementation.

The book is organized in three parts. The first deals with system design and methodology issues. The second presents problems and solutions concerning the hardware and the basic communication infrastructure. Finally, the third part covers operating system, embedded software and application. However, communication from the physical to the application level is a central theme throughout the book.

The book serves as an excellent reference source and may be usedas a text for advanced courses on the subject.

This book provides a single-source reference on the use of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as interconnect material for horizontal, on-chip and 3D interconnects. The authors demonstrate the uses of bundles of CNTs, as innovative conducting material to fabricate interconnect through-silicon vias (TSVs), in order to improve the performance, reliability and integration of 3D integrated circuits (ICs). This book will be first to provide a coherent overview of exploiting carbon nanotubes for 3D interconnects covering aspects from processing, modeling, simulation, characterization and applications. Coverage also includes a thorough presentation of the application of CNTs as horizontal on-chip interconnects which can potentially revolutionize the nanoelectronics industry. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the state-of-the-art on exploiting carbon nanotubes for interconnects for both 2D and 3D integrated circuits.

This book presents exact, that is minimal, solutions to individual steps in the design process for Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs), as well as a one-pass approach that combines all these steps in a single process. All of the approaches discussed are based on a formal model that can easily be extended to cope with further design problems. In addition to the exact methods, heuristic approaches are provided and the complexity classes of various design problems are determined. Presents exact methods to tackle a variety of design problems for Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs); Describes an holistic, one-pass approach solving different design steps all at once; Based on a formal model of DMFBs that is easily adaptable to deal with further design tasks.

This book covers state-of-the art techniques for high-level modeling and validation of complex hardware/software systems, including those with multicore architectures. Readers will learn to avoid time-consuming and error-prone validation from the comprehensive coverage of system-level validation, including high-level modeling of designs and faults, automated generation of directed tests, and efficient validation methodology using directed tests and assertions. The methodologies described in this book will help designers to improve the quality of their validation, performing as much validation as possible in the early stages of the design, while reducing the overall validation effort and cost.

High Performance Computing Systems and Applications contains fully refereed papers from the 15th Annual Symposium on High Performance Computing. These papers cover both fundamental and applied topics in HPC: parallel algorithms, distributed systems and architectures, distributed memory and performance, high level applications, tools and solvers, numerical methods and simulation, advanced computing systems, and the emerging area of computational grids.

High Performance Computing Systems and Applications is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

As the complexity of modern embedded systems increases, it becomes less practical to design monolithic processing platforms. As a result, reconfigurable computing is being adopted widely for more flexible design. Reconfigurable Computers offer the spatial parallelism and fine-grained customizability of application-specific circuits with the postfabrication programmability of software. To make the most of this unique combination of performance and flexibility, designers need to be aware of both hardware and software issues. FPGA users must think not only about the gates needed to perform a computation but also about the software flow that supports the design process. The goal of this book is to help designers become comfortable with these issues, and thus be able to exploit the vast opportunities possible with reconfigurable logic.

This book describes new, fuzzy logic-based mathematical apparatus, which enable readers to work with continuous variables, while implementing whole circuit simulations with speed, similar to gate-level simulators and accuracy, similar to circuit-level simulators. The author demonstrates newly developed principles of digital integrated circuit simulation and optimization that take into consideration various external and internal destabilizing factors, influencing the operation of digital ICs. The discussion includes factors including radiation, ambient temperature, electromagnetic fields, and climatic conditions, as well as non-ideality of interconnects and power rails.

This book presents a detailed review of high-performance computing infrastructures for next-generation big data and fast data analytics. Features: includes case studies and learning activities throughout the book and self-study exercises in every chapter; presents detailed case studies on social media analytics for intelligent businesses and on big data analytics (BDA) in the healthcare sector; describes the network infrastructure requirements for effective transfer of big data, and the storage infrastructure requirements of applications which generate big data; examines real-time analytics solutions; introduces in-database processing and in-memory analytics techniques for data mining; discusses the use of mainframes for handling real-time big data and the latest types of data management systems for BDA; provides information on the use of cluster, grid and cloud computing systems for BDA; reviews the peer-to-peer techniques and tools and the common information visualization techniques, used in BDA.

This book discusses the opportunities offered by disruptive technologies to overcome the economical and physical limits currently faced by the electronics industry. It provides a new methodology for the fast evaluation of an emerging technology from an architectural prospective and discusses the implications from simple circuits to complex architectures. Several technologies are discussed, ranging from 3-D integration of devices (Phase Change Memories, Monolithic 3-D, Vertical NanoWires-based transistors) to dense 2-D arrangements (Double-Gate Carbon Nanotubes, Sublithographic Nanowires, Lithographic Crossbar arrangements). Novel architectural organizations, as well as the associated tools, are presented in order to explore this freshly opened design space.

Operating systems kernels are central to the functioning of computers. Security of the overall system, as well as its reliability and responsiveness, depend upon the correct functioning of the kernel. This unique approach - presenting a formal specification of a kernel - starts with basic constructs and develops a set of kernels; proofs are included as part of the text.

This book describes state-of-the-art approaches to Fog Computing, including the background of innovations achieved in recent years. Coverage includes various aspects of fog computing architectures for Internet of Things, driving reasons, variations and case studies. The authors discuss in detail key topics, such as meeting low latency and real-time requirements of applications, interoperability, federation and heterogeneous computing, energy efficiency and mobility, fog and cloud interplay, geo-distribution and location awareness, and case studies in healthcare and smart space applications.

As e-government applications are coming of age, security has been gradually becoming more demanding a requirement for users, administrators, and service providers. The increasingly widespread use of Web services facilitates the exchange of data among various e-government applications, and paves the way for enhanced service delivery. ""Secure E-Government Web Services"" addresses various aspects of building secure e-government architectures and services, and presents the views of experts from academia, policy, and the industry to conclude that secure e-government Web services can be deployed in an application-centric and interoperable way. ""Secure E-Government Web Services"" presents the promising area of Web services, shedding new light onto this innovative area of applications, and responding to the current and upcoming challenges of e-government security.

The development of nature-inspired computational techniques has enhanced problem solving in dynamic and uncertain environments. By implementing effective computing strategies, this ensures adaptable, self-organizing, and decentralized behavioral techniques. Recent Developments in Intelligent Nature-Inspired Computing is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly material on natural computation methods and applications in diverse fields. Highlighting multidisciplinary studies on swarm intelligence, global optimization, and group technology, this publication is an ideal reference source for professionals, researchers, scholars, and engineers interested in the latest developments in computer science methodologies.

This book explores the design implications of emerging, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies on future computer memory hierarchy architecture designs. Since NVM technologies combine the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash memory, they are very attractive as the basis for future universal memories. This book provides a holistic perspective on the topic, covering modeling, design, architecture and applications. The practical information included in this book will enable designers to exploit emerging memory technologies to improve significantly the performance/power/reliability of future, mainstream integrated circuits.

Digital signal processing is an area of science and engineering that has been developed rapidly over the past years. This rapid development is the result of the significant advances in digital computer technology and integrated circuits fabrication. Many of the signal processing tasks conventionally performed by analog means, are realized today by less expensive and often more reliable digital hardware. Multirate Systems: Design and Applications addresses the rapid development of multirate digital signal processing and how it is complemented by the emergence of new applications.

The implementation of object-oriented languages has been an active topic of research since the 1960s when the first Simula compiler was written. The topic received renewed interest in the early 1980s with the growing popularity of object-oriented programming languages such as c++ and Smalltalk, and got another boost with the advent of Java. Polymorphic calls are at the heart of object-oriented languages, and even the first implementation of Simula-67 contained their classic implementation via virtual function tables. In fact, virtual function tables predate even Simula-for example, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad drawing editor employed very similar structures in 1960. Similarly, during the 1970s and 1980s the implementers of Smalltalk systems spent considerable efforts on implementing polymorphic calls for this dynamically typed language where virtual function tables could not be used. Given this long history of research into the implementation of polymorphic calls, and the relatively mature standing it achieved over time, why, one might ask, should there be a new book in this field? The answer is simple. Both software and hardware have changed considerably in recent years, to the point where many assumptions underlying the original work in this field are no longer true. In particular, virtual function tables are no longer sufficient to implement polymorphic calls even for statically typed languages; for example, Java's interface calls cannot be implemented this way. Furthermore, today's processors are deeply pipelined and can execute instructions out-of order, making it difficult to predict the execution time of even simple code sequences."

In three main divisions the book covers combinational circuits, latches, and asynchronous sequential circuits. Combinational circuits have no memorising ability, while sequential circuits have such an ability to various degrees. Latches are the simplest sequential circuits, ones with the shortest memory. The presentation is decidedly non-standard. The design of combinational circuits is discussed in an orthodox manner using normal forms and in an unorthodox manner using set-theoretical evaluation formulas relying heavily on Karnaugh maps. The latter approach allows for a new design technique called composition. Latches are covered very extensively. Their memory functions are expressed mathematically in a time-independent manner allowing the use of (normal, non-temporal) Boolean logic in their calculation. The theory of latches is then used as the basis for calculating asynchronous circuits. Asynchronous circuits are specified in a tree-representation, each internal node of the tree representing an internal latch of the circuit, the latches specified by the tree itself. The tree specification allows solutions of formidable problems such as algorithmic state assignment, finding equivalent states non-recursively, and verifying asynchronous circuits.

Multicore Processors and Systems provides a comprehensive overview of emerging multicore processors and systems. It covers technology trends affecting multicores, multicore architecture innovations, multicore software innovations, and case studies of state-of-the-art commercial multicore systems. A cross-cutting theme of the book is the challenges associated with scaling up multicore systems to hundreds of cores.

The book provides an overview of significant developments in the architectures for multicore processors and systems. It includes chapters on fundamental requirements for multicore systems, including processing, memory systems, and interconnect. It also includes several case studies on commercial multicore systems that have recently been developed and deployed across multiple application domains. The architecture chapters focus on innovative multicore execution models as well as infrastructure for multicores, including memory systems and on-chip interconnections. The case studies examine multicore implementations across different application domains, including general purpose, server, media/broadband, network processing, and signal processing.

Multicore Processors and Systems is the first book that focuses solely on multicore processors and systems, and in particular on the unique technology implications, architectures, and implementations. The book has contributing authors that are from both the academic and industrial communities.

This book describes for readers a methodology for dynamic power estimation, using Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). The methodology exploits the existing tools for RTL simulation, design synthesis and SystemC prototyping to provide fast and accurate power estimation using Transaction Level Power Modeling (TLPM). Readers will benefit from this innovative way of evaluating power on a high level of abstraction, at an early stage of the product life cycle, decreasing the number of the expensive design iterations.