:system ON Chip

This book is the third in a series of books collecting the best papers from the three main regional conferences on electronic system design languages, HDLCon in the United States, APCHDL in Asia-Pacific and FDL in Europe. Being APCHDL bi-annual, this book presents a selection of papers from HDLCon'Ol and FDL'OI. HDLCon is the premier HDL event in the United States. It originated in 1999 from the merging of the International Verilog Conference and the Spring VHDL User's Forum. The scope of the conference expanded from specialized languages such as VHDL and Verilog to general purpose languages such as C++ and Java. In 2001 it was held in February in Santa Clara, CA. Presentations from design engineers are technical in nature, reflecting real life experiences in using HDLs. EDA vendors presentations show what is available - and what is planned-for design tools that utilize HDLs, such as simulation and synthesis tools. The Forum on Design Languages (FDL) is the European forum to exchange experiences and learn of new trends, in the application of languages and the associated design methods and tools, to design complex electronic systems. FDL'OI was held in Lyon, France, around seven interrelated workshops, Hardware Description Languages, Analog and Mixed signal Specification, C/C++ HW/SW Specification and Design, Design Environments & Languages, Real-Time specification for embedded Systems, Architecture Modeling and Reuse and System Specification & Design Languages.

As the number of processor cores and IP blocks integrated on a single chip is steadily growing, a systematic approach to design the communication infrastructure becomes necessary. Different variants of packed switched on-chip networks have been proposed by several groups during the past two years. This book summarizes the state of the art of these efforts and discusses the major issues from the physical integration to architecture to operating systems and application interfaces. It also provides a guideline and vision about the direction this field is moving to. Moreover, the book outlines the consequences of adopting design platforms based on packet switched network. The consequences may in fact be far reaching because many of the topics of distributed systems, distributed real-time systems, fault tolerant systems, parallel computer architecture, parallel programming as well as traditional system-on-chip issues will appear relevant but within the constraints of a single chip VLSI implementation.

This book describes several techniques to address variation-related design challenges for analog blocks in mixed-signal systems-on-chip. The methods presented are results from recent research works involving receiver front-end circuits, baseband filter linearization, and data conversion. These circuit-level techniques are described, with their relationships to emerging system-level calibration approaches, to tune the performances of analog circuits with digital assistance or control. Coverage also includes a strategy to utilize on-chip temperature sensors to measure the signal power and linearity characteristics of analog/RF circuits, as demonstrated by test chip measurements.

This book provides a state-of-the-art guide to Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques that have been shown to be highly efficient for diagnosis of failures in electronic circuits and systems. The methods discussed can be used for volume diagnosis after manufacturing or for diagnosis of customer returns. Readers will be enabled to deal with huge amount of insightful test data that cannot be exploited otherwise in an efficient, timely manner. After some background on fault diagnosis and machine learning, the authors explain and apply optimized techniques from the ML domain to solve the fault diagnosis problem in the realm of electronic system design and manufacturing. These techniques can be used for failure isolation in logic or analog circuits, board-level fault diagnosis, or even wafer-level failure cluster identification. Evaluation metrics as well as industrial case studies are used to emphasize the usefulness and benefits of using ML-based diagnosis techniques.

This book focuses on a specific engineering problem that is and will continue to be important in the forth-coming information age: namely, the need for highly integrated radio systems that can be embedded in wireless devices for various applications, including portable mobile multimedia wireless communications, wireless appliances, digital cellular, and digital cordless.

An emerging trend in the automobile industry is its convergence with information technology (IT). Indeed, it has been estimated that almost 90% of new automobile technologies involve IT in some form. Smart driving technologies that improve safety as well as green fuel technologies are quite representative of the convergence between IT and automobiles. The smart driving technologies include three key elements: sensing of driving environments, detection of objects and potential hazards, and the generation of driving control signals including warning signals.