Sandeep Kumar Shukla

Pankaj Chaudhary

Shubhankar Suman

Multifaceted Approaches Combining Low or High LET Radiation and Pharmacological Interventions in Cancer and Radioprotection: From Bench to Bedside

Gaurav Singh

Human lives are getting increasingly entangled with technology, especially comp- ing and electronics. At each step we take, especially in a developing world, we are dependent on various gadgets such as cell phones, handheld PDAs, netbooks, me- cal prosthetic devices, and medical measurement devices (e.g., blood pressure m- itors, glucometers). Two important design constraints for such consumer electronics are their form factor and battery life. This translates to the requirements of reduction in the die area and reduced power consumption for the semiconductor chips that go inside these gadgets. Performance is also important, as increasingly sophisticated applications run on these devices, and many of them require fast response time. The form factor of such electronics goods depends not only on the overall area of the chips inside them but also on the packaging, which depends on thermal ch- acteristics. Thermal characteristics in turn depend on peak power signature of the chips. As a result, while the overall energy usage reduction increases battery life, peak power reduction in?uences the form factor. One more important aspect of these electronic equipments is that every 6 months or so, a newer feature needs to be added to keep ahead of the market competition, and hence new designs have to be completed with these new features, better form factor, battery life, and performance every few months. This extreme pressure on the time to market is another force that drives the innovations in design automation of semiconductor chips.

Low Power Hardware Synthesis from Concurrent Action-Oriented Specifications

Rajesh Gupta

Jean-Pierre Talpin

Paul Le Guernic

Perhaps nothing characterizes the inherent heterogeneity in embedded sys tems than the ability to choose between hardware and software implementations of a given system function. Indeed, most embedded systems at their core repre sent a careful division and design of hardware and software parts of the system To do this task effectively, models and methods are necessary functionality. to capture application behavior, needs and system implementation constraints. Formal modeling can be valuable in addressing these tasks. As with most engineering domains, co-design practice defines the state of the it seeks to add new capabilities in system conceptualization, mod art, though eling, optimization and implementation. These advances -particularly those related to synthesis and verification tasks -direct1y depend upon formal under standing of system behavior and performance measures. Current practice in system modeling relies upon exploiting high-level programming frameworks, such as SystemC, EstereI, to capture design at increasingly higher levels of ab straction and attempts to reduce the system implementation task. While raising the abstraction levels for design and verification tasks, to be really useful, these approaches must also provide for reuse, adaptation of the existing intellectual property (IP) blocks.

A System Level Perspective

Formal Methods and Models for System Design

Hiren Patel

SystemC Kernel Extensions for Heterogeneous System Modeling is a result of an almost two year endeavour on our part to understand how SystemC can be made useful for system level modeling at higher levels of abstraction. Making it a truly heterogeneous modeling language and platform, for hardware/software co-design as well as complex embedded hardware designs has been our focus in the work reported in this book.

A Framework for Multi-MoC Modeling & Simulation

SystemC Kernel Extensions for Heterogeneous System Modeling

R. Iris Bahar

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. The questions that confront computer engineers regarding the current status of nanocomputing material and the reliability of systems built from such miniscule devices, are difficult to articulate and answer. We have found a lack of resources in the confines of a single volume that at least partially attempts to answer these questions. We believe that this volume contains a large amount of research material as well as new ideas that will be very useful for some one starting research in the arena of nanocomputing, not at the device level, but the problems one would face at system level design and validation when nanoscopic physicality will be present at the device level.

Implications to High Level Design and Validation

Nano, Quantum and Molecular Computing

Hiren D. Patel

ESL or “Electronic System Level” is a buzz word these days, in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, in design houses, and in the academia. Even though numerous trade magazine articles have been written, quite a few books have been published that have attempted to de?ne ESL, it is still not clear what exactly it entails. However, what seems clear to every one is that the “Register Transfer Level” (RTL) languages are not adequate any more to be the design entry point for today’s and tomorrow’s complex electronic system design. There are multiple reasons for such thoughts. First, the c- tinued progression of the miniaturization of the silicon technology has led to the ability of putting almost a billion transistors on a single chip. Second, applications are becoming more and more complex, and integrated with c- munication, control, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and hence the need for ever faster, ever more reliable, and more robust electronic systems is pu- ing designers towards a productivity demand that is not sustainable without a fundamental change in the design methodologies. Also, the hardware and software functionalities are getting interchangeable and ability to model and design both in the same manner is gaining importance. Given this context, we assume that any methodology that allows us to model an entire electronic system from a system perspective, rather than just hardware with discrete-event or cycle based semantics is an ESL method- ogy of some kind.

Ingredients for Successful System Level Design Methodology

Sekharipuram S. Ravi

Essays in Honor of Professor Daniel J. Rosenkrantz

Fundamental Problems in Computing

Sumit Ahuja

Avinash Lakshminarayana

This book presents novel research techniques, algorithms, methodologies and experimental results for high level power estimation and power aware high-level synthesis. Readers will learn to apply such techniques to enable design flows resulting in shorter time to market and successful low power ASIC/FPGA design.

Low Power Design with High-Level Power Estimation and Power-Aware Synthesis

Embedded software is ubiquitous today. There are millions of lines of embedded code in smart phones, and even more in systems responsible for automotive control, avionics control, weapons control and space missions. Some of these are safety-critical systems whose correctness, timely response, and reliability are of paramount importance. These requirement pose new challenges to system designers. This necessitates that a proper design science, based on "constructive correctness" be developed. Correct-by-construction design and synthesis of embedded software is done in a way so that post-development verification is minimized, and correct operation of embedded systems is maximized. This book presents the state of the art in the design of safety-critical, embedded software. It introduced readers to three major approaches to specification driven, embedded software synthesis/construction: synchronous programming based approaches, models of computation based approaches, and an approach based on concurrent programming with a co-design focused language. It is an invaluable reference for practitioners and researchers concerned with improving the product development life-cycle.

Sandeep Kumar Shukla

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