The eye is a complex sensory organ, which enables visual perception of the world. Thus the eye has several tissues that do different tasks. One of the most basic aspects of eye function is the sensitivity of cells to light and its transduction though the optic nerve to the brain. Different organisms use different ways to achieve these tasks. In this sense, eye function becomes a very important evolutionary aspect as well. This book presents the different animal models that are commonly used for eye research and their uniqueness in evaluating different aspects of eye development, evolution, physiology and disease.
* Presents information on the major animal models used in eye research including invertebrates and vertebrates
* Provides researchers with information needed to choose between model organisms
* Includes an introductory chapter on the different types of eyes, stressing possible common molecular machinery

‘My hope is that people can grow to appreciate this sector – its challenges and opportunities, but most importantly, the role agriculture can play in improving South Africa’s rural economy, creating jobs and bringing about much-needed transformation (or inclusive growth).’
Wandile Sihlobo is perfectly positioned to provide a well-rounded, accessible view of agriculture in South Africa. He spent his school holidays in the rural Eastern Cape, studied agricultural economics at university, has worked in private-sector agriculture, consulting with farmers across the country, and has been an adviser to government as part of South African policymaking bodies.

Finding Common Ground is a selection of key articles from Sihlobo’s regular Business Day column, framed with insightful commentary and context. The book covers the broad themes that have marked current discussions and outlines the challenges and opportunities faced by South Africa’s agricultural sector, including:

• The contentious and complex issue of land reform;
• The potential for new leadership to revive the sector;
• How agriculture can drive development and job creation;
• Cannabis as an exportable commodity;
• The urgent need for agricultural policy to address gender equity and youth involvement;
• Technological developments and megatrends that are underpinning agricultural development;
• The importance of trade in growing South Africa’s agriculture; and Key lessons that South Africa and other African countries can learn from one another.

In 1998-99, at the dawn of the SoC Revolution, we wrote Surviving the SOC Revolution: A Guide to Platform Based Design. In that book, we focused on presenting guidelines and best practices to aid engineers beginning to design complex System-on-Chip devices (SoCs). Now, in 2003, facing the mid-point of that revolution, we believe that it is time to focus on winning.

In this book, Winning the SoC Revolution: Experiences in Real Design, we gather the best practical experiences in how to design SoCs from the most advanced design groups, while setting the issues and techniques in the context of SoC design methodologies. As an edited volume, this book has contributions from the leading design houses who are winning in SoCs - Altera, ARM, IBM, Philips, TI, UC Berkeley, and Xilinx. These chapters present the many facets of SoC design - the platform based approach, how to best utilize IP, Verification, FPGA fabrics as an alternative to ASICs, and next generation process technology issues. We also include observations from Ron Wilson of CMP Media on best practices for SoC design team collaboration. We hope that by utilizing this book, you too, will win the SoC Revolution.

The design process of embedded systems has changed substantially in recent years. One of the main reasons for this change is the pressure to shorten time-to-market when designing digital systems. To shorten the product cycles, programmable processes are used to implement more and more functionality of the embedded system. Therefore, nowadays, embedded systems are very often implemented by heterogeneous systems consisting of ASICs, processors, memories and peripherals. As a consequence, the research topic of hardware/software co-design, dealing with the problems of designing these heterogeneous systems, has gained great importance. Hardware/Software Co-design for Data Flow Dominated Embedded Systems introduces the different tasks of hardware/software co-design including system specification, hardware/software partitioning, co-synthesis and co-simulation. The book summarizes and classifies state-of-the-art co-design tools and methods for these tasks. In addition, the co-design tool COOL is presented which solves the co-design tasks for the class of data-flow dominated embedded systems. In Hardware/Software Co-design for Data Flow Dominated Embedded Systems the primary emphasis has been put on the hardware/software partitioning and the co-synthesis phase and their coupling. In contrast to many other publications in this area, a mathematical formulation of the hardware/software partitioning problem is given. This problem formulation supports target architectures consisting of multiple processors and multiple ASICs. Several novel approaches are presented and compared for solving the partitioning problem, including an MILP approach, a heuristic solution and an approach based on geneticalgorithms. The co-synthesis phase is based on the idea of controlling the system by means of a static run-time scheduler implemented in hardware. New algorithms are introduced which generate a complete set of hardware and software specifications required to implement heterogeneous systems. All of these techniques are described in detail and exemplified. Hardware/Software Co-design for Data Flow Dominated Embedded Systems is intended to serve students and researchers working on hardware/software co-design. At the same time the variety of presented techniques automating the design tasks of hardware/software systems will be of interest to industrial engineers and designers of digital systems. From the foreword by Peter Marwedel: Niemann's method should be known by all persons working in the field. Hence, I recommend this book for everyone who is interested in hardware/software co-design.

The building blocks of today's embedded systems-on-a-chip are complex IP components and programmable processor cores. This means that more and more system functionality is implemented in software rather than in custom hardware. In turn, this indicates a growing need for high-level language compilers, capable of generating efficient code for embedded processors. However, traditional compiler technology hardly keeps pace with new developments in embedded processor architectures. Many existing compilers for DSPs and multimedia processors therefore produce code of insufficient quality with respect to performance and/or code size, and a large part of software for embedded systems is still being developed in assembly languages. As both embedded software as well as processors architectures are getting more and more complex, assembly programming clearly violates the demands for a short time-to-market and high dependability in embedded system design. The goal of this book is to provide new methods and techniques to software and compiler developers, that help to make the necessary step from assembly programming to the use of compilers also in embedded system design. Code Optimization Techniques for Embedded Processors discusses the state-of-the-art in the area of compilers for embedded processors. It presents a collection of new code optimization techniques, dedicated to DSP and multimedia processors. These include: compiler support for DSP address generation units, efficient mapping of data flow graphs to irregular architectures, exploitation of SIMD and conditional instructions, as well as function inlining under code size constraints. Comprehensive experimental evaluations are given forreal-life processors, that indicate the code quality improvements which can be achieved as compared to earlier techniques. In addition, C compiler frontend issues are discussed from a practical viewpoint. Code Optimization Techniques for Embedded Processors is intended for researchers and engineers active in software development for embedded systems, and for compiler developers in academia and industry.

Embedded computer systems use both off-the-shelf microprocessors and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to implement specialized system functions. Examples include the electronic systems inside laser printers, cellular phones, microwave ovens, and an automobile anti-lock brake controller. Embedded computing is unique because it is a co-design problem - the hardware engine and application software architecture must be designed simultaneously. Hardware-Software Co-Synthesis of Distributed Embedded Systems proposes new techniques such as fixed-point iterations, phase adjustment, and separation analysis to efficiently estimate tight bounds on the delay required for a set of multi-rate processes preemptively scheduled on a real-time reactive distributed system. Based on the delay bounds, a gradient-search co-synthesis algorithm with new techniques such as sensitivity analysis, priority prediction, and idle- processing elements elimination are developed to select the number and types of processing elements in a distributed engine, and determine the allocation and scheduling of processes to processing elements. New communication modeling is also presented to analyze communication delay under interaction of computation and communication, allocate interprocessor communication links, and schedule communication. Hardware-Software Co-Synthesis of Distributed Embedded Systems is the first book to describe techniques for the design of distributed embedded systems, which have arbitrary hardware and software topologies. The book will be of interest to: academic researchers for personal libraries and advanced-topics courses in co-design as well as industrial designers who are building high-performance, real-time embedded systems with multiple processors.

Algorithms for VLSI Physical Design Automation, Third Edition covers all aspects of physical design. The book is a core reference for graduate students and CAD professionals. For students, concepts and algorithms are presented in an intuitive manner. For CAD professionals, the material presents a balance of theory and practice. An extensive bibliography is provided which is useful for finding advanced material on a topic. At the end of each chapter, exercises are provided, which range in complexity from simple to research level. Algorithms for VLSI Physical Design Automation, Third Edition provides a comprehensive background in the principles and algorithms of VLSI physical design. The goal of this book is to serve as a basis for the development of introductory-level graduate courses in VLSI physical design automation. It provides self-contained material for teaching and learning algorithms of physical design. All algorithms which are considered basic have been included, and are presented in an intuitive manner. Yet, at the same time, enough detail is provided so that readers can actually implement the algorithms given in the text and use them. The first three chapters provide the background material, while the focus of each chapter of the rest of the book is on each phase of the physical design cycle. In addition, newer topics such as physical design automation of FPGAs and MCMs have been included. The basic purpose of the third edition is to investigate the new challenges presented by interconnect and process innovations. In 1995 when the second edition of this book was prepared, a six-layer process and 15 million transistor microprocessors were in advanced stages of design. In 1998, six metal process and 20 million transistor designs are in production. Two new chapters have been added and new material has been included in almost allother chapters. A new chapter on process innovation and its impact on physical design has been added. Another focus of the third edition is to promote use of the Internet as a resource, so wherever possible URLs have been provided for further investigation. Algorithms for VLSI Physical Design Automation, Third Edition is an important core reference work for professionals as well as an advanced level textbook for students.

This book grants the reader a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The authors introduce their own system-level data transfer and storage exploration methodology for data-dominated video applications. This methodology tackles the power and area reduction cost components in the architecture for this target domain, namely the system-level busses and the background memories. For the most critical tasks in the methodology, prototype tools have been developed to reduce the design time. The approach is also very heavily application-driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. The quite general applicability and effectiveness has been substantiated for several industrial data-dominated applications, including H.263 video conferencing decoding and medical computer tomography (CT) back projection. To the researcher the book will serve as an excellent reference source, both for the overall description of the methodology and for the detailed descriptions of the system-level methodologies and synthesis techniques and algorithms. To the design engineers and CAD managers it offers an invaluable insight into the anticipated evolution of commercially available design tools as well as allowing them to utilize the book's concepts in their own research and development.