Learn Microsoft's major new PC hardware standard.

••PCI EXPRESS is considered to be the most general purpose bus so it should appeal to a wide audience in this arena.•Today's buses are becoming more specialized to meet the needs of the particular system applications, building the need for this book.•Mindshare and their only competitor in this space, Solari, team up in this new book.

Learn all you need to know to engineer reliable, high-performance PCI products with text written in practical and comprehensive prose. The bestselling PCI book for computer engineers now fully updated for PCI Revision 2.2.

The primary audience for this book are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Computer architecture, as it happened in other fields such as electronics, evolved from the small to the large, that is, it left the realm of low-level hardware constructs, and gained new dimensions, as distributed systems became the keyword for system implementation. As such, the system architect, today, assembles pieces of hardware that are at least as large as a computer or a network router or a LAN hub, and assigns pieces of software that are self-contained, such as client or server programs, Java applets or pro tocol modules, to those hardware components. The freedom she/he now has, is tremendously challenging. The problems alas, have increased too. What was before mastered and tested carefully before a fully-fledged mainframe or a closely-coupled computer cluster came out on the market, is today left to the responsibility of computer engineers and scientists invested in the role of system architects, who fulfil this role on behalf of software vendors and in tegrators, add-value system developers, R&D institutes, and final users. As system complexity, size and diversity grow, so increases the probability of in consistency, unreliability, non responsiveness and insecurity, not to mention the management overhead. What System Architects Need to Know The insight such an architect must have includes but goes well beyond, the functional properties of distributed systems.

System Design: A Practical Guide with SpecC presents the system design flow following a simple example through the whole process in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step fashion. Each step is described in detail in pictorial form and with code examples in SpecC. For each picture slide a detailed explanation is provided of the concepts presented. This format is suited for tutorials, seminars, self-study, as a guided reference carried by examples, or as teaching material for courses on system design. Features: Comprehensive introduction to and description of the SpecC language and design methodology; IP-centric language and methodology with focus on design reuse; Complete framework for system-level design from specification to implementation for SOCs and other embedded HW/SW systems. System Design: A Practical Guide with SpecC will benefit designers and design managers of complex SOCs, or embedded systems in general, by allowing them to develop new methodologies from these results, in order to increase design productivity by orders of magnitude. Designers at RTL, logical or physical levels, who are interested in moving up to the system level, will find a comprehensive overview within. The design models in the book define IP models and functions for IP exchange between IP providers and their users. A well-defined methodology like the one presented in this book will help product planning divisions to quickly develop new products or to derive completely new business models, like e-design or product-on-demand. Finally, researchers and students in the area of system design will find an example of a formal, well-structured design flow in this book.

The Space Plug-and-Play Architecture System Manager (SSM) is a system of Space Plug-and-Play Architecture (SPA) hardware, software components, and services for rapid integration of satellite systems. It was originally designed to help decrease the amount of time and money required to integrate payloads onto a satellite. The features of the SSM make it useful in non-satellite systems. In this report, I demonstrate diverse uses of the SSM in a multi-use payload management and underwater vehicle software solution which was designed and implemented using the SSM. Further I give a detailed explanation of the successes and failures of the software when used in a robotics application. Finally, I conclude with recommended additions to the SSM that would help solve the deficiencies found in the underwater vehicle software.