Hardware Design and Petri Nets presents a summary of the state of the art in the applications of Petri nets to designing digital systems and circuits. The area of hardware design has traditionally been a fertile field for research in concurrency and Petri nets. Many new ideas about modelling and analysis of concurrent systems, and Petri nets in particular, originated in theory of asynchronous digital circuits. Similarly, the theory and practice of digital circuit design have always recognized Petri nets as a powerful and easy-to-understand modelling tool. The ever-growing demand in the electronic industry for design automation to build various types of computer-based systems creates many opportunities for Petri nets to establish their role of a formal backbone in future tools for constructing systems that are increasingly becoming distributed, concurrent and asynchronous. Petri nets have already proved very effective in supporting algorithms for solving key problems in synthesis of hardware control circuits. However, since the front end to any realistic design flow in the future is likely to rely on more pragmatic Hardware Description Languages (HDLs), such as VHDL and Verilog, it is crucial that Petri nets are well interfaced to such languages. Hardware Design and Petri Nets is divided into five parts, which cover aspects of behavioral modelling, analysis and verification, synthesis from Petri nets and STGs, design environments based on high-level Petri nets and HDLs, and finally performance analysis using Petri nets. Hardware Design and Petri Nets serves as an excellent reference source and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

As CMOS semiconductor technology strides towards billions of transistors on a single die new problems arise on the way. They are concerned with the - minishing fabrication process features, which a?ect for example the gate-to-wire delay ratio. They manifest themselves in greater variations of size and operating parameters of devices, which put the overall reliability of systems at risk. And, most of all, they have tremendous impact on design productivity, where the costs of utilizing the growing silicon ‘real estate’ rocket to billions of dollars that have to be spent on design, veri?cation, and testing. All such problems call for new - sign approaches and models for digital systems. Furthermore, new developments in non-CMOS technologies, such as single-electron transistors, rapid single-?- quantum devices, quantum dot cells, molecular devices, etc. , add extra demand for new research in system design methodologies. What kind of models and design methodologies will be required to build systems in all these new technologies? Answering this question, even for each particular type of new technology generation, is not easy, especially because sometimes it is not even clear what kind of elementary devices are feasible there. This problem is of an interdisciplinary nature. It requires an bridges between di?erent scienti?c communities. The bridges must be built very quickly, and be maximally ?exible to accommodate changes taking place in a logarithmic timescale.

Using formal methods for the specification and verification of hardware and software systems is becoming increasingly important as systems increase in size and complexity. The aim of the book is to illustrate progress in formal methods based on Petri net formalisms. It presents both practical and theoretical foundations for the use of Petri nets in complex system engineering tasks. In doing so it bridges the gap between Petri nets and the systems modeling and implementation process. It contains a collection of examples arising from different fields, such as flexible manufacturing, telecommunication and workflow management systems.

Formal methods for hardware design still find limited use in industry. Yet current practice has to change to cope with decreasing design times and increasing quality requirements. This research report presents results from the Esprit project FORMAT (formal methods in hardware verification) which involved the collaboration of the enterprises Siemens, Italtel, Telefonica I+D, TGI, and AHL, the research institute OFFIS, and the universities of Madrid and Passau. The work presented involves advanced specification languages for hardware design that are intuitive to the designer, like timing diagrams and state based languages, as well as their relation to VHDL and formal languages like temporal logic and a process-algebraic calculus. The results of experimental tests of the tools are also presented.

In this book key contributions on developments and challenges in research and education on microelectronics, microsystems and related areas are published. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: emerging fields in design and technology, new concepts in teaching, multimedia in microelectronics, industrial roadmaps and microelectronic education, curricula, nanoelectronics teaching, long distance education. The book is intended for academic education level and targets professors, researchers and PhDs involved in microelectronics and/or more generally, in electrical engineering, microsystems and material sciences. The 2004 edition of European Workshop on Microelectronics Education (EWME) is particularly focused on the interface between microelectronics and bio-medical sciences.

This volume presents the technical program of the 2007 International Embedded Systems Symposium held in Irvine, California. It covers timely topics, techniques and trends in embedded system design, including design methodology, networks-on-chip, distributed and networked systems, and system verification. It places emphasis on automotive and medical applications and includes case studies and special aspects in embedded system design.

The aims of these proceedings are to provide a complete coverage of the areas outlined, and to bring together researchers from academic and industry to share ideas, challenges, and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of this field. New multimedia standards (for example, MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in increasingly effective ways, contributing to the multimedia revolution and having a significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, education, and governmental domains.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the Advanced Research Working Conference on Correct Hardware Design Methodologies, held in Arles, France, in May 1993, and organized by the ESPRIT Working Group 6018 CHARME-2and the Universit de Provence, Marseille, in cooperation with IFIP Working Group 10.2. Formal verification is emerging as a plausible alternative to exhaustive simulation for establishing correct digital hardware designs. The validation of functional and timing behavior is a major bottleneck in current VLSI design systems, slowing the arrival of products in the marketplace with its associated increase in cost. From being a predominantly academic area of study until a few years ago, formal design and verification techniques are now beginning to migrate into industrial use. As we are now witnessing an increase in activity in this area in both academia and industry, the aim of this working conference was to bring together researchers and users from both communities.

In the past few decades Computer Hardware Description Languages (CHDLs) have been a rapidly expanding subject area due to a number of factors, including the advancing complexity of digital electronics, the increasing prevalence of generic and programmable components of software-hardware and the migration of VLSI design to high level synthesis based on HDLs. Currently the subject has reached the consolidation phase in which languages and standards are being increasingly used, at the same time as the scope is being broadened to additional application areas. This book presents the latest developments in this area and provides a forum from which readers can learn from the past and look forward to what the future holds.

Este libro presenta los desafíos planteados por las nuevas y sumamente poderosas tecnologías de integración de sistemas electrónicos, que están en la base de los cambios sociales hacia lo que llaman la Sociedad de la Información; en la que los dispositivos electrónicos se harán una parte incorporada de la vida diaria, encajados en casi cada producto. Es necesario un conocimiento cuidadoso de los desafíos para aprovechar la amplia gama de ocasiones ofrecidas por tales capacidades de integración y las correspondientes posibilidades de diseño de sistemas electrónicos.