This book introduces a design methodology that can help to bridge the productivity gap. Two different types of designs, depending on the design challenge, have been identified. To validate the presented methodologies, the authors have selected and designed accordingly three different industrial-strength applications.

Systematic Design of Analog IP Blocks introduces a design methodology that can help to bridge the productivity gap. Two different types of designs, depending on the design challenge, have been identified: commodity IP and star IP. Each category requires a different approach to boost design productivity. Commodity IP blocks are well suited to be automated in an analog synthesis environment and provided as soft IP. The design knowledge is usually common knowledge, and reuse is high accounting for the setup time needed for the analog library. Star IP still changes as technology evolves and the design cost can only be reduced by following a systematic design approach supported by point tools to relieve the designer from error-prone, repetitive tasks, allowing him/her to focus on new ideas to push the limits of the design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2001, held in London, UK, in January 2001. The 26 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. All current issues on database theory and the foundations of database systems are addressed. Among the topics covered are database queries, SQL, information retrieval, database logic, database mining, constraint databases, transactions, algorithmic aspects, semi-structured data, data engineering, XML, term rewriting, clustering, etc.