Power Aware Design Methodologies was conceived as an effort to bring all aspects of power-aware design methodologies together in a single document. It covers several layers of the design hierarchy from technology, circuit logic, and architectural levels up to the system layer. It includes discussion of techniques and methodologies for improving the power efficiency of CMOS circuits (digital and analog), systems on chip, microelectronic systems, wirelessly networked systems of computational nodes and so on. In addition to providing an in-depth analysis of the sources of power dissipation in VLSI circuits and systems and the technology and design trends, this book provides a myriad of state-of-the-art approaches to power optimization and control. The different chapters of Power Aware Design Methodologies have been written by leading researchers and experts in their respective areas. Contributions are from both academia and industry. The contributors have reported the various technologies, methodologies, and techniques in such a way that they are understandable and useful.

This book describes a new design approach for energy-efficient, Domain-Specific Instruction set Processor (DSIP) architectures for the wireless baseband domain. The innovative techniques presented enable co-design of algorithms, architectures and technology, for efficient implementation of the most advanced technologies. To demonstrate the feasibility of the author’s design approach, case studies are included for crucial functionality of advanced wireless systems with increased computational performance, flexibility and reusability. Designers using this approach will benefit from reduced development/product costs and greater scalability to future process technology nodes.

The power consumption of microprocessors is one of the most important challenges of high-performance chips and portable devices. In chapters drawn from Piguet's recently published Low-Power Electronics Design, this volume addresses the design of low-power microprocessors in deep submicron technologies. It provides a focused reference for specialists involved in systems-on-chips, from low-power microprocessors to DSP cores, reconfigurable processors, memories, ad-hoc networks, and embedded software. Low-Power Processors and Systems on Chips is organized into three broad sections for convenient access. The first section examines the design of digital signal processors for embedded applications and techniques for reducing dynamic and static power at the electrical and system levels. The second part describes several aspects of low-power systems on chips, including hardware and embedded software aspects, efficient data storage, networks-on-chips, and applications such as routing strategies in wireless RF sensing and actuating devices. The final section discusses embedded software issues, including details on compilers, retargetable compilers, and coverification tools. Providing detailed examinations contributed by leading experts, Low-Power Processors and Systems on Chips supplies authoritative information on how to maintain high performance while lowering power consumption in modern processors and SoCs. It is a must-read for anyone designing modern computers or embedded systems.

The power consumption of integrated circuits is one of the most problematic considerations affecting the design of high-performance chips and portable devices. The study of power-saving design methodologies now must also include subjects such as systems on chips, embedded software, and the future of microelectronics. Low-Power Electronics Design covers all major aspects of low-power design of ICs in deep submicron technologies and addresses emerging topics related to future design. This volume explores, in individual chapters written by expert authors, the many low-power techniques born during the past decade. It also discusses the many different domains and disciplines that impact power consumption, including processors, complex circuits, software, CAD tools, and energy sources and management. The authors delve into what many specialists predict about the future by presenting techniques that are promising but are not yet reality. They investigate nanotechnologies, optical circuits, ad hoc networks, e-textiles, as well as human powered sources of energy. Low-Power Electronics Design delivers a complete picture of today's methods for reducing power, and also illustrates the advances in chip design that may be commonplace 10 or 15 years from now.

This book describes a new, coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA), called Blocks, and puts it in the context of computer architectures, and in particular of other CGRAs. The book starts with an extensive evaluation of historic and existing CGRAs and their strengths and weaknesses. This also leads to a better understanding and new definition of what distinguishes CGRAs from other architectural approaches. The authors introduce Blocks as unique due to its separate programmable control and data paths, allowing light-weight instruction decode units to be arbitrarily connected to one or more functional units (FUs) over a statically configured interconnect. The discussion includes an explanation of how to model architectures, resulting in an area and energy model for Blocks. The accuracy of this model is evaluated against fully implemented architectures, showing that although it is three orders of magnitude faster than synthesis the error margin is very acceptable. The book concludes with a case study on a real System-on-Chip, including a RISC architecture, the Blocks CGRA and peripherals.

Reconfigurable computing brings immense flexibility to on-chip processing while network-on-chip has improved flexibility in on-chip communication. Integrating these two areas of research reaps the benefits of both and represents the promising future of multiprocessor systems-on-chip. This book is the one of the first compilations written to demonstrate this future for network-on-chip design. Through dynamic and creative research into questions ranging from integrating reconfigurable computing techniques, to task assigning, scheduling and arrival, to designing an operating system to take advantage of the computing and communication flexibilities brought about by run-time reconfiguration and network-on-chip, it represents a complete source of the techniques and applications for reconfigurable network-on-chip necessary for understanding of future of this field.

This book brings together a selection of the best papers from the fifteenth edition of the Forum on specification and Design Languages Conference (FDL), which was held in September 2012 at Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria. FDL is a well-established international forum devoted to dissemination of research results, practical experiences and new ideas in the application of specification, design and verification languages to the design, modeling and verification of integrated circuits, complex hardware/software embedded systems, and mixed-technology systems.