Integrated circuit densities and operating speeds continue to rise at an exponential rate. Chips, however, cannot get larger and faster without a sharp decrease in power consumption beyond the current levels. Minimization of power consumption in VLSI chips has thus become an important design objective. In fact, with the explosive growth in demand for portable electronics and the usual push toward more complex functionality and higher performance, power consumption has in many cases become the limiting factor in satisfying the market demand. A new generation of power-conscious CAD tools are coming onto the market to help designers estimate, optimize and verify power consumption levels at most stages of the IC design process. These tools are especially prevalent at the register-transfer level and below. There is a great need for similar tools and capabilities at the behavioral and system levels of the design process. Many researchers and CAD tool developers are working on high-level power modeling and estimation, as well as power-constrained high-level synthesis and optimization. Techniques and tools alone are, however, insufficient to optimize VLSI circuit power dissipation - a consistent and convergent design methodology is also required. Power Optimization and Synthesis at Behavioral and System Levels Using Formal Methods was written to address some of the key problems in power analysis and optimization early in the design process. In particular, this book focuses on power macro-modeling based on regression analysis and power minimization through behavioral transformations, scheduling, resource assignment and hardware/software partitioning and mapping. What differentiates this book from other published work on the subject is the mathematical basis and formalism behind the algorithms and the optimality of these algorithms subject to the stated assumptions. From the Foreword: `This book makes an important contribution to the field of system design technologies by presenting a set of algorithms with guaranteed optimality properties, that can be readily applied to system-level design. This contribution is timely, because it fills the need of new methods for a new design tool generation, which supports the design of electronic systems with even more demanding requirements'. Giovanni De Micheli, Professor, Stanford University

Integrated circuit densities and operating speeds continue to rise at an exponential rate. Chips, however, cannot get larger and faster without a sharp decrease in power consumption beyond the current levels. Minimization of power consumption in VLSI chips has thus become an important design objective. In fact, with the explosive growth in demand for portable electronics and the usual push toward more complex functionality and higher performance, power consumption has in many cases become the limiting factor in satisfying the market demand. A new generation of power-conscious CAD tools are coming onto the market to help designers estimate, optimize and verify power consumption levels at most stages of the IC design process. These tools are especially prevalent at the register-transfer level and below. There is a great need for similar tools and capabilities at the behavioral and system levels of the design process. Many researchers and CAD tool developers are working on high-level power modeling and estimation, as well as power-constrained high-level synthesis and optimization. Techniques and tools alone are, however, insufficient to optimize VLSI circuit power dissipation - a consistent and convergent design methodology is also required. Power Optimization and Synthesis at Behavioral and System Levels Using Formal Methods was written to address some of the key problems in power analysis and optimization early in the design process. In particular, this book focuses on power macro-modeling based on regression analysis and power minimization through behavioral transformations, scheduling, resource assignment and hardware/software partitioning and mapping. What differentiates this book from other published work on the subject is the mathematical basis and formalism behind the algorithms and the optimality of these algorithms subject to the stated assumptions. From the Foreword: This book makes an important contribution to the field of system design technologies by presenting a set of algorithms with guaranteed optimality properties, that can be readily applied to system-level design. This contribution is timely, because it fills the need of new methods for a new design tool generation, which supports the design of electronic systems with even more demanding requirements'. Giovanni De Micheli, Professor, Stanford University

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.

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.

This self-contained book addresses the need for analysis, characterization, estimation, and optimization of the various forms of power dissipation in the presence of process variations of nano-CMOS technologies. The authors show very large-scale integration (VLSI) researchers and engineers how to minimize the different types of power consumption of digital circuits. The material deals primarily with high-level (architectural or behavioral) energy dissipation.

This handbook incorporates new developments in automation. It also presents a widespread and well-structured conglomeration of new emerging application areas, such as medical systems and health, transportation, security and maintenance, service, construction and retail as well as production or logistics. The handbook is not only an ideal resource for automation experts but also for people new to this expanding field.