High Level Design

One of the grand challenges in the nano-scopic computing era is guarantees of robustness. Robust computing system design is confronted with quantum physical, probabilistic, and even biological phenomena, and guaranteeing high reliability is much more difficult than ever before. Scaling devices down to the level of single electron operation will bring forth new challenges due to probabilistic effects and uncertainty in guaranteeing 'zero-one' based computing. Minuscule devices imply billions of devices on a single chip, which may help mitigate the challenge of uncertainty by replication and redundancy. However, such device densities will create a design and validation nightmare with the shear scale.

One of the grand challenges in the nano-scopic computing era is guarantees of robustness. Robust computing system design is confronted with quantum physical, probabilistic, and even biological phenomena, and guaranteeing high reliability is much more difficult than ever before. Scaling devices down to the level of single electron operation will bring forth new challenges due to probabilistic effects and uncertainty in guaranteeing 'zero-one' based computing. Minuscule devices imply billions of devices on a single chip, which may help mitigate the challenge of uncertainty by replication and redundancy. However, such device densities will create a design and validation nightmare with the shear scale.

This book looks at the problem of design verification with a view towards speeding up the process of verification by developing methods that apply to levels of abstraction above RTL or synchronous logic descriptions. Typically such descriptions capture design functionality at the system level, hence the topic area is also referred to as system level verification. Since such descriptions can also capture software, especially device drivers or other embedded software, this book will be of interest to both hardware and software designers.