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.

From the Back Cover

Low Power Hardware Synthesis from Concurrent Action-Oriented Specifications Gaurav Singh Sandeep K. Shukla This book introduces novel techniques for generating low-power hardware from a high-level description of a design in terms of Concurrent Action-Oriented Specifications (CAOS). It also describes novel techniques for formal verification of such designs. It will provide the readers with definitions of various power optimization and formal verification problems related to CAOS-based synthesis, necessary background concepts, techniques to generate hardware according to the design’s power requirements, and detailed experimental results obtained by applying the techniques introduced on realistic hardware designs. •Presents detailed analysis of various power optimization problems associated with high-level synthesis, as well as novel techniques for reducing power consumption of hardware designs at a higher level of abstraction; •Discusses various formal verification issues associated with synthesizing different possible versions of a hardware design (differing in their latency, area, and/or power consumption); •Includes detailed experimental results obtained by applying the techniques introduced on benchmark hardware designs.

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