In order to design and build computers that achieve and sustain high performance, it is essential that reliability issues be considered care fully. The problem has several aspects. Certainly, considering reliability implies that an engineer must be able to analyze how design decisions affect the incidence of failure. For instance, in order design reliable inte gritted circuits, it is necessary to analyze how decisions regarding design rules affect the yield, i.e., the percentage of functional chips obtained by the manufacturing process. Of equal importance in producing reliable computers is the detection of failures in its Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit components, caused by errors in the design specification, implementation, or manufacturing processes. Design verification involves the checking of the specification of a design for correctness prior to carrying out an implementation. Implementation verification ensures that the manual design or automatic synthesis process is correct, i.e., the mask-level description correctly implements the specification. Manufacture test involves the checking of the complex fabrication process for correctness, i.e., ensuring that there are no manufacturing defects in the integrated circuit. It should be noted that all the above verification mechanisms deal not only with verifying the functionality of the integrated circuit but also its performance."

For over three decades now, silicon capacity has steadily been doubling every year and a half with equally staggering improvements continuously being observed in operating speeds. This increase in capacity has allowed for more complex systems to be built on a single silicon chip. Coupled with this functionality increase, speed improvements have fueled tremendous advancements in computing and have enabled new multi-media applications. Such trends, aimed at integrating higher levels of circuit functionality are tightly related to an emphasis on compactness in consumer electronic products and a widespread growth and interest in wireless communications and products. These trends are expected to persist for some time as technology and design methodologies continue to evolve and the era of Systems on a Chip has definitely come of age. While technology improvements and spiraling silicon capacity allow designers to pack more functions onto a single piece of silicon, they also highlight a pressing challenge for system designers to keep up with such amazing complexity. To handle higher operating speeds and the constraints of portability and connectivity, new circuit techniques have appeared. Intensive research and progress in EDA tools, design methodologies and techniques is required to empower designers with the ability to make efficient use of the potential offered by this increasing silicon capacity and complexity and to enable them to design, test, verify and build such systems.

Rapid increases in chip complexity, increasingly faster clocks, and the proliferation of portable devices have combined to make power dissipation an important design parameter. The power consumption of a digital system determines its heat dissipation as well as battery life. For some systems, power has become the most critical design constraint. Computer-Aided Design Techniques for Low Power Sequential Logic Circuits presents a methodology for low power design. The authors first present a survey of techniques for estimating the average power dissipation of a logic circuit. At the logic level, power dissipation is directly related to average switching activity. A symbolic simulation method that accurately computes the average switching activity in logic circuits is then described. This method is extended to handle sequential logic circuits by modeling correlation in time and by calculating the probabilities of present state lines. Computer-Aided Design Techniques for Low Power Sequential Logic Circuits then presents a survey of methods to optimize logic circuits for low power dissipation which target reduced switching activity. A method to retime a sequential logic circuit where registers are repositioned such that the overall glitching in the circuit is minimized is also described. The authors then detail a powerful optimization method that is based on selectively precomputing the output logic values of a circuit one clock cycle before they are required, and using the precomputed value to reduce internal switching activity in the succeeding clock cycle. Presented next is a survey of methods that reduce switching activity in circuits described at the register-transfer and behavioral levels. Also described is a scheduling algorithm that reduces power dissipation by maximising the inactivity period of the modules in a given circuit. Computer-Aided Design Techniques for Low Power Sequential Logic Circuits concludes with a summary and directions for future research.

The current trend towards the realization of complex and versatile Systems on a Chip requires the combined efforts and attention of experts in a wide range of areas including microsystems, embedded hardware/software systems, dedicated ASIC and programmable logic hardware, reconfigurable computing, wireless communications and RF issues, video and image processing, memory systems, low power design techniques, design, test and verification algorithms, modeling and simulation, logic synthesis, and interconnect analysis. Thus, the contributions presented herein address a wide range of Systems on a Chip problems. VLSI: Systems on a Chip comprises the selected proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI '99), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and was held in Lisbon, Portugal, in December 1999.The volume is organized around two themes, in which the following topics are addressed: VLSI Systems Design and Applications * Analog Systems Design * Analog Modeling and Design * Image Processing * Reconfigurable Computing * Memory and System Design * Low Power Design VLSI Design Methods and CAD * Test and Verification * Analog CAD and Interconnect * Fundamental CAD Algorithms * Verification and Simulation * CAD for Physical Design * High-Level Synthesis and Verification of Embedded Systems VLSI: Systems on a Chip is essential reading for researchers working on system integration, design, and CAD.

Rapid increases in chip complexity, increasingly faster clocks, and the proliferation of portable devices have combined to make power dissipation an important design parameter. The power consumption of a digital system determines its heat dissipation as well as battery life. For some systems, power has become the most critical design constraint. Computer-Aided Design Techniques for Low Power Sequential Logic Circuits presents a methodology for low power design. The authors first present a survey of techniques for estimating the average power dissipation of a logic circuit. At the logic level, power dissipation is directly related to average switching activity. A symbolic simulation method that accurately computes the average switching activity in logic circuits is then described. This method is extended to handle sequential logic circuits by modeling correlation in time and by calculating the probabilities of present state lines. Computer-Aided Design Techniques for Low Power Sequential Logic Circuits then presents a survey of methods to optimize logic circuits for low power dissipation which target reduced switching activity. A method to retime a sequential logic circuit where registers are repositioned such that the overall glitching in the circuit is minimized is also described. The authors then detail a powerful optimization method that is based on selectively precomputing the output logic values of a circuit one clock cycle before they are required, and using the precomputed value to reduce internal switching activity in the succeeding clock cycle. Presented next is a survey of methods that reduce switching activity in circuits described at the register-transfer and behavioral levels. Also described is a scheduling algorithm that reduces power dissipation by maximising the inactivity period of the modules in a given circuit. Computer-Aided Design Techniques for Low Power Sequential Logic Circuits concludes with a summary and directions for future research.

In order to design and build computers that achieve and sustain high performance, it is essential that reliability issues be considered care fully. The problem has several aspects. Certainly, considering reliability implies that an engineer must be able to analyze how design decisions affect the incidence of failure. For instance, in order design reliable inte gritted circuits, it is necessary to analyze how decisions regarding design rules affect the yield, i.e., the percentage of functional chips obtained by the manufacturing process. Of equal importance in producing reliable computers is the detection of failures in its Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit components, caused by errors in the design specification, implementation, or manufacturing processes. Design verification involves the checking of the specification of a design for correctness prior to carrying out an implementation. Implementation verification ensures that the manual design or automatic synthesis process is correct, i.e., the mask-level description correctly implements the specification. Manufacture test involves the checking of the complex fabrication process for correctness, i.e., ensuring that there are no manufacturing defects in the integrated circuit. It should be noted that all the above verification mechanisms deal not only with verifying the functionality of the integrated circuit but also its performance."