This book is the sixth in the ChDL (Chip Design Languages) series. Year 2004 has seen many efforts in the ?eld of electronic and mixed technology circuit design languages. The industry has recognized the need for system level design as a way to enable the design of the next generation of emb- ded systems. This is demonstrated by the "ESL Now!" campaign that many companies are promoting. This year has also seen many interesting st- dardization efforts for system level design, such as SystemC TLM (http: //www. systemc. org/) for transactional level modeling with SystemC, AU- TOSAR (http://www. autosar. org/) for automotive embedded system - plications, or SPIRIT (http://www. spiritconsortium. org/) for IP int- change. In the ?eld of modeling languages, the Model Driven Architecture of the OMG (http://www. omg. org/mda/) has given rise to model driven en- neering, which is a more general way of software engineering based on model transformations. As embedded systems are more and more programmable and as the design abstraction level rises, model driven methodologies are also c- sidered for electronic system level design. In this context, the OMG has - cently published a call for propositions for a UML 2. 0 pro?le for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE). The constraints on the design process of these next generation embedded systems are considerable: Real-time, power consumption, complexity, mixed technology integration, correctness, time to market, cost, ...

The seventh book in the CHDL Series is composed of a selection of the best articles from the Forum on Specification and Design Languages (FDL'04). FDL is the European Forum to learn and exchange on new trends on the application of languages and models for the design of electronic and heterogeneous systems.

The forum was structured around four workshops that are all represented in the book by outstanding articles: Analog and Mixed-Signal Systems, UML-based System Specification and Design, C/C++-Based System Design and Languages for Formal Specification and Verification.

The Analog and Mixed-Signal Systems contributions bring some answers to the difficult problem of co-simulating discrete and continuous models of computation. The UML-based System Specification and Design chapters bring insight into how to use the Model Driven Engineering to design Systems-on-Chip. The C/C++-Based System Design articles mainly explore system level design with SystemC. The Languages for Formal
Specification and Verification is represented by an invited contribution on the use of temporal assertions for symbolic model checking and simulation. And finally chapter in this book contributed by preeminent members of the automotive design industry presents the recent industry standard AutoSAR.

Overall Advances in Design and Specification Languages for SoCs is an excellent opportunity to catch up with the latest research developments in the field of languages for electronic and heterogeneous system design.