The papers in this book were presented at the CMU Conference on VLSI Systems and Computations, held October 19-21, 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The conference was organized by the Computer Science Department, Carnegie-Mellon University and was partially supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. These proceedings focus on the theory and design of computational systems using VLSI. Until very recently, integrated-circuit research and development were concentrated in the device physics and fabrication design disciplines and in the integrated-circuit industry itself. Within the last few years, a community of researchers is growing to address issues closer to computer science: the relationship between computing structures and the physical structures that implement them; the specification and verification of computational procosses implemented in VLSI; the use of massively parallel computing made possible by VLSI; the design of special purpose computing architectures; and the changes in general-purpose computer architecture that VLSI makes possible. It is likely that the future exploitation of VLSI technology depends as much on structural and design innovations as on advances in fabrication technology. The book is divided into nine sections: - Invited Papers. Six distinguished researchers from industry and academia presented invited papers. - Models of Computation. The papers in this section deal with abstracting the properties of VLSI circuits into models that can be used to analyze the chip area, time or energy required for a particular computation.

Mos devices and circuits - Integrated system fabrication - Data and control flow in systematic structures - Implementing integrated system designs : from circuit topology to patterning geometry to wafer fabrication - Overview of an LSI computer system, and the design of the OM2 data PATH CHIP - Architecture and design of system controllers, and the design of the OM2 controller CHIP - System timing - Highly concurrent systems - Physics of computational systems.

Numerical simulation is rapidly becoming an important part of the VLSI design process, allowing the engineer to test, evaluate, and optimize various aspects of chip design without resorting to the costly and time-consuming process of fabricating prototypes. This procedure not only accelerates the design process, but also improves the end product, since it is economically feasible to numerically simulate many more options than might otherwise be considered. With the enhanced computing power of today's computers, more sophisticated models are now being developed. This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS-SIAM Summer Seminar on Computational Aspects of VLSI Design, held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications at the University of Minnesota, in the spring of 1987. The seminar featured presentations by some of the top experts working in this area. Their contributions to this volume form an excellent overview of the mathematical and computational problems arising in this area.

A self-contained text, suitable for a broad audience. Presents basic concepts in electronics, transistor physics, and neurobiology for readers without backgrounds in those areas. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR