This volume contains the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets (ICATPN 2004). The aim of the Petri net conferences is to create a forum for discussing progress in the application and theory of Petri nets. Typically, the conferenceshave 100-150participants, one third of these c- ing from industry, whereas the others are from universities and research insti- tions. The conferences always take place in the last week of June. The conference and a number of other activities are coordinated by a ste- ing committee with the following members: Wil van der Aalst (The Neth- lands), JonathanBillington(Australia), JrgDesel(Germany), SusannaDonatelli (Italy), SergeHaddad(France), KurtJensen(Denmark), MaciejKoutny(United Kingdom), Sadatoshi Kumagai(Japan), GiorgioDe Michelis (Italy), Tadao- rata (USA), Carl Adam Petri (Germany, Honorary Member), Wolfgang Reisig (Germany), GrzegorzRozenberg(TheNetherlands, Chairman)andManuelSilva (Spain). The 2004 conference was organized by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna, Italy. We would like to thank the organizing c- mittee, chaired by Roberto Gorrieri, for the e?ort invested in making the event successful. We are also grateful to the following sponsoring institutions and - ganizations: Associazione Italiana per l'Informatica ed il Calcolo Automatico (AICA), Microsoft Research, and Network Project & Solutions (NPS Group). We received a total of 62 submissions from 26 di?erent countries. The p- gramcommittee?nallyselected19regularpapersand5toolpresentationpapers. This volume comprises the papers that were accepted for presentation. Invited lectures were given by Gianfranco Ciardo, Roberto Gorrieri, Thomas A. H- zinger, Wojciech Penczek, Lucia Pomello and William H. Sanders. Their papers are also included in this volume.

This LNCS State-of-the-Art Survey is devoted to the relatively old and well-known behavioral paradigm in computing, concurrency, and to the ways in which concurrency is exhibited or can be exploited in digital hardware devices.The nine chapters presented are organized in four parts on formal methods, asynchronous circuits, embedded systems design, and timed verification and performance analysis.

The number of gates on a chip is quickly growing toward and beyond the one billion mark. Keeping all the gates running at the beat of a single or a few rationally related clocks is becoming impossible. However, the electronics industry for the most part is still reluctant to adopt asynchronous design due to a common belief that there is a lack of commercial-quality Electronic Design Automation tools for asynchronous circuits. Design Automation of Real-Life Asynchronous Devices and Systems presents design flows that can tackle large designs without significant changes with respect to synchronous design flow. Limiting it self to the four design flows that come closest to this goal it starts by overviewing the most commercially and technically proven, Tangram. The other three flows, Null Convention Logic, de-synchronization and gate-level pipelining, can be considered as asynchronous re-implementations of synchronous specifications. The book demonstrates the possibility of implementing large legacy synchronous designs in an almost ""push button"" manner negating the need to re-educate synchronous RTL designers. It is essential reading for designers and researchers in large scale integrated circuit design.