the outcome of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) This book is held in Neuss (near Dusseldorf), Federal Republic of Germany from 28 September to 2 October, 1987. The workshop assembled some 50 invited experts from Europe, Ameri­ ca, and Japan representing the fields of Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience, Cellular Automata, Artificial Intelligence, and Compu­ ter Design; more than 20 additional scientists from various countries attended as observers. The 50 contributions in this book cover a wide range of topics, including: Neural Network Architecture, Learning and Memory, Fault Tolerance, Pattern Recognition, and Motor Control in Brains versus Neural Computers. Twelve of these contributions are review papers. The readability of this book was enhanced by a number of measures: * The contributions are arranged in seven chapters. * A separate List of General References helps newcomers to this ra­ pidly growing field to find introductory books. * The Collection of References from all Contributions provides an alphabetical list of all references quoted in the individual con­ tributions. * Separate Reference Author and Subject Indices facilitate access to various details. Group Reports (following the seven chapters) summarize the discus­ sions regarding four specific topics relevant for the 'state of the art' in Neural Computers.

System on chips designs have evolved from fairly simple unicore, single memory designs to complex heterogeneous multicore SoC architectures consisting of a large number of IP blocks on the same silicon. To meet high computational demands posed by latest consumer electronic devices, most current systems are based on such paradigm, which represents a real revolution in many aspects in computing. The attraction of multicore processing for power reduction is compelling. By splitting a set of tasks among multiple processor cores, the operating frequency necessary for each core can be reduced, allowing to reduce the voltage on each core. Because dynamic power is proportional to the frequency and to the square of the voltage, we get a big gain, even though we may have more cores running. As more and more cores are integrated into these designs to share the ever increasing processing load, the main challenges lie in efficient memory hierarchy, scalable system interconnect, new programming paradigms, and efficient integration methodology for connecting such heterogeneous cores into a single system capable of leveraging their individual flexibility. Current design methods tend toward mixed HW/SW co-designs targeting multicore systems on-chip for specific applications. To decide on the lowest cost mix of cores, designers must iteratively map the device’s functionality to a particular HW/SW partition and target architectures. In addition, to connect the heterogeneous cores, the architecture requires high performance complex communication architectures and efficient communication protocols, such as hierarchical bus, point-to-point connection, or Network-on-Chip. Software development also becomes far more complex due to the difficulties in breaking a single processing task into multiple parts that can be processed separately and then reassembled later. This reflects the fact that certain processor jobs cannot be easily parallelized to run concurrently on multiple processing cores and that load balancing between processing cores – especially heterogeneous cores – is very difficult.

Distributed Infrastructure Support For E-Commerce And Distributed Applications is organized in three parts. The first part constitutes an overview, a more detailed motivation of the problem context, and a tutorial-like introduction to middleware systems. The second part is comprised of a set of chapters that study solutions to leverage the trade-off between a transparent programming model and application-level enabled resource control. The third part of this book presents three detailed distributed application case studies and demonstrates how standard middleware platforms fail to adequately cope with resource control needs of the application designer in these three cases:

Active Objects are a programming paradigm that supports a non-competitive, data-driven concurrency model. This renders active object languages to be well-suited for simulation, data race-free programming, and formal verification. Concepts from active objects made their way into languages such as Rust, ABS, Akka, JavaScript, and Go. This is the first comprehensive state-of-art overview on the subject, the invited contributions are written by experts in the areas of distributed systems, formal methods, and programming languages.

One of the main problems in chip design is the huge number of possible combinations of individual chip elements, leading to a combinatorial explosion as chips become more complex. New key results in theoretical computer science and in the design of data structures and efficient algorithms, can be applied fruitfully here. The application of ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) has led to dramatic performance improvements in many computer-aided design projects. This textbook provides an introduction to the foundations of this interdisciplinary research area with an emphasis on applications in computer-aided circuit design and formal verification.

This book provides a superb introduction to and overview of the MIT PI System for custom VLSI placement and routing. Alan Sher­ man has done an excellent job of collecting and clearly presenting material that was previously available only in various theses, confer­ ence papers, and memoranda. He has provided here a balanced and comprehensive presentation of the key ideas and techniques used in PI, discussing part of his own Ph. D. work (primarily on the place­ ment problem) in the context of the overall design of PI and the contributions of the many other PI team members. I began the PI Project in 1981 after learning first-hand how dif­ ficult it is to manually place modules and route interconnections in a custom VLSI chip. In 1980 Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, and I designed a custom VLSI chip for performing RSA encryp­ tion/decryption [226]. I became fascinated with the combinatorial and algorithmic questions arising in placement and routing, and be­ gan active research in these areas. The PI Project was started in the belief that many of the most interesting research issues would arise during an actual implementation effort, and secondarily in the hope that a practically useful tool might result. The belief was well-founded, but I had underestimated the difficulty of building a large easily-used software tool for a complex domain; the PI soft­ ware should be considered as a prototype implementation validating the design choices made.

This book is an edited selection of the papers presented at the International Workshop on VLSI for Artiflcial Intelligence which was held at the University of Oxford in July 1988. Our thanks go to all the contributors and especially to the programme committee for all their hard work. Thanks are also due to the ACM-SIGARCH, the Alvey Directorate, the lEE and the IEEE Computer Society for publicising the event and to Oxford University for their active support. We are particularly grateful to David Cawley and Paula Appleby for coping with the administrative problems.

This textbook introduces readers to the fundamental hardware used in modern computers. The only pre-requisite is algebra, so it can be taken by college freshman or sophomore students or even used in Advanced Placement courses in high school. This book presents both the classical approach to digital system design (i.e., pen and paper) in addition to the modern hardware description language (HDL) design approach (computer-based). This textbook enables readers to design digital systems using the modern HDL approach while ensuring they have a solid foundation of knowledge of the underlying hardware and theory of their designs.

This is an introductory textbook for courses in Synchronous Digital Design that enables students to develop useful intuitions for all of the key concepts of digital design. The author focuses this tutorial on the design flow, which is introduced as an iterative cycle of Analysis, Improvement, Modeling, and Synthesis. All the basic elements of digital design are covered, starting with the CMOS transistor to provide an abstraction upon which everything else is built. The other main foundational concepts introduced are clocked synchronous register-transfer level design, datapath, finite state machines and communication between clock domains.

This book explores and motivates the need for building homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-core systems for machine learning to enable flexibility and energy-efficiency. Coverage focuses on a key aspect of the challenges of (extreme-)edge-computing, i.e., design of energy-efficient and flexible hardware architectures, and hardware-software co-optimization strategies to enable early design space exploration of hardware architectures. The authors investigate possible design solutions for building single-core specialized hardware accelerators for machine learning and motivates the need for building homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-core systems to enable flexibility and energy-efficiency. The advantages of scaling to heterogeneous multi-core systems are shown through the implementation of multiple test chips and architectural optimizations.

This textbook demonstrates new paradigms for the interface between CMOS circuits and the biological world. A deep theoretical description of such an interface is defined and discussed, while various real applications are demonstrated by also discussing several analog CMOS circuits. Electrochemical techniques are proposed in detail to learn how to design integrated biosensors. Biological materials are described to provide devices selectivity. Nanoscale materials are discussed to provide device sensitivity. CMOS circuits are analyzed to provide real applications. Extensive examples with solutions are provided, as well as exercises at the end of each chapter.

This textbook provides semester-length coverage of the basics of embedded programming to develop robotics-related projects. The author avoids the typical, theoretical approach of teaching students to develop embedded software using formal methods, in order to emphasize practical and fun projects. Every project detail is explained, including the overall system architecture, working principles of each peripheral device, program development to integrate each peripheral to the system, how to configure the processor, functionality check, operating system, and even developing front-end electronics for some sensors which do not have digital interface.

This textbook provides semester-length coverage of the basics of embedded programming to develop robotics-related projects. The author avoids the typical, theoretical approach of teaching students to develop embedded software using formal methods, in order to emphasize practical and fun projects. Every project detail is explained, including the overall system architecture, working principles of each peripheral device, program development to integrate each peripheral to the system, how to configure the processor, functionality check, operating system, and even developing front-end electronics for some sensors which do not have digital interface.

Synchronization is one of the important issues in digital system design. While other approaches have always been intriguing, up until now synchro­ nous operation using a common clock has been the dominant design philo­ sophy. However, we have reached the point, with advances in technology, where other options should be given serious consideration. This is because the clock periods are getting much smaller in relation to the interconnect propagation delays, even within a single chip and certainly at the board and backplane level. To a large extent, this problem can be overcome with care­ ful clock distribution in synchronous design, and tools for computer-aided design of clock distribution. However, this places global constraints on the design, making it necessary, for example, to redesign the clock distribution each time any part of the system is changed. In this book, some alternative approaches to synchronization in digital sys­ tem design are described and developed. We owe these techniques to a long history of effort in both digital system design and in digital communica­ tions, the latter field being relevant because large propagation delays have always been a dominant consideration in design. While synchronous design is discussed and contrasted to the other techniques in Chapter 6, the dom­ inant theme of this book is alternative approaches.

Describing and designing complex electronic systems has become an overwhelming activit)' for which VHDL is showing increasingly useful and promising support. Although created as a description language. VHDL is being increasingly used as a simulatable and synthcsizablcdcsign language. For the first time, here is abook which describesa number of unique and powerful ways VHDL can be used to solve typical design problems in systems ·· ones which must be designed correctly in vcry short periodsoflime.