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This aesthetically unique book combines ecological, morphological and anatomical, as well as phylogenetic studies on plant material in a largely unexplored dry mountain region above the timberline. It offers the first comparative analysis of hundreds of plants - annuals, perennial herbs and dwarf shrubs - in an area of 87,000 km2 at altitudes from 2600 to 6150 m above sea level in the Western Himalaya. Characteristic landscape pictures of all major vegetation types and maps show at which locations and altitudes the individual species of vascular plants are distributed, while macroscopic plant pictures and plant age are related to high-quality micro-sections and micro-photographs.

Rapid Prototyping of Digital Systems: Quartus II Edition provides an exciting and challenging laboratory component for undergraduate digital logic and computer design courses using FPGAs and CAD tools for simulation and hardware implementation. The more advanced topics and exercises also make this text useful for upper level courses in digital logic, programmable logic, and embedded systems. This new version of the widely used Rapid Prototyping of Digital Systems, Second Edition, now uses Altera's new Quartus II CAD tool and includes laboratory projects for Altera's UP 2 and the new UP 3 FPGA board.

Intellectual Property Protection in VLSI Designs: Theory and Practice provides an overview of the security problems in modern VLSI design with a detailed treatment of our newly developed constraint-based protection paradigm for the protection of VLSI design IPs from FPGA design to standard-cell placement, from high-level synthesis solutions to gate-level netlist place-and-rout, and from advanced CAD tools to physical design algorithms. The problem of VLSI design IP protection is much more challenging than the protection of multimedia contents or software, and our protection paradigm is also conceptually different from the state-of-the-art approaches in those domains.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are pre-fabricated, programmable digital integrated circuits (ICs), provide easy access to state-of-the-art integrated circuit process technology, and in doing so, democratize this technology of our time. This book is about comparing the qualities of FPGA – their speed performance, area and power consumption, against custom-fabricated ICs, and exploring ways of mitigating their de ciencies. This work began as a question that many have asked, and few had the resources to answer – how much worse is an FPGA compared to a custom-designed chip? As we dealt with that question, we found that it was far more dif cult to answer than we anticipated, but that the results were rich basic insights on fundamental understandings of FPGA architecture. It also encouraged us to nd ways to leverage those insights to seek ways to make FPGA technology better, which is what the second half of the book is about. While the question “How much worse is an FPGA than an ASIC?” has been a constant sub-theme of all research on FPGAs, it was posed most directly, some time around May 2004, by Professor Abbas El Gamal from Stanford University to us – he was working on a 3D FPGA, and was wondering if any real measurements had been made in this kind of comparison. Shortly thereafter we took it up and tried to answer in a serious way.

Embedded systems applications that are either mission or safety-critical usually entail low- to mid- production volumes, require the rapid development of specific tasks, which are typically computing intensive, and are cost bounded. The adoption of re-configurable FPGAs in such application domains is constrained to the availability of suitable techniques to guarantee the dependability requirements entailed by critical applications. This book describes the challenges faced by designers when implementing a mission- or safety-critical application using re-configurable FPGAs and it details various techniques to overcome these challenges. In addition to an overview of the key concepts of re-configurable FPGAs, it provides a theoretical description of the failure modes that can cause incorrect operation of re-configurable FPGA-based electronic systems. It also outlines analysis techniques that can be used to forecast such failures and covers the theory behind solutions to mitigate fault effects. This book also reviews current technologies available for building re-configurable FPGAs, specifically SRAM-based technology and Flash-based technology. For each technology introduced, theoretical concepts presented are applied to real cases. Design techniques and tools are presented to develop critical applications using commercial, off-the-shelf devices, such as Xilinx Virtex FPGAs, and Actel ProASIC FPGAs. Alternative techniques based on radiation hardened FPGAs, such as Xilinx SIRF and Atmel ATF280 are also presented. This publication is an invaluable reference for anyone interested in understanding the technologies of re-configurable FPGAs, as well as designers developing critical applications based on these technologies.

Logic Synthesis Using Synopsys®, Second Edition is for anyone who hates reading manuals but would still like to learn logic synthesis as practised in the real world. Synopsys Design Compiler, the leading synthesis tool in the EDA marketplace, is the primary focus of the book. The contents of this book are specially organized to assist designers accustomed to schematic capture-based design to develop the required expertise to effectively use the Synopsys Design Compiler. Over 100 `Classic Scenarios' faced by designers when using the Design Compiler have been captured, discussed and solutions provided. These scenarios are based on both personal experiences and actual user queries. A general understanding of the problem-solving techniques provided should help the reader debug similar and more complicated problems. In addition, several examples and dc_shell scripts (Design Compiler scripts) have also been provided.

This is the third edition of the European Workshop on Microelectronics Education (EWME). A steady-state regime has now been reached. An international community of university teachers is constituted; they exchange their experience and their pedagogical tools. They discuss the best ways to transfer the rapidly changing techniques to their students, and to introduce them to the new physical and mathematical concepts and models for the innovative techniques, devices, circuits and design methods. The number of abstracts submitted to EWME 2000 (about one hundred) enabled the scientific committee to proceed to a clear selection. EWME is a European meeting. Indeed, authors from 20 different European countries contribute to this volume. Nevertheless, the participation of authors from Brazil, Canada, China, New Zealand, and USA, shows that the workshop gradually attains an international dimension. th The 20 century can be characterized as the "century of electron". The electron, as an elementary particle, was discovered by J.J. Thomson in 1897, and was rapidly used to transfer energy and information. Thanks to electron, universe and micro-cosmos could be explored. Electron became the omnipotent and omnipresent, almost immaterial, angel of our W orId. This was made possible thanks to electronics and, for the last 30 years, to microelectronics. Microelectronics not only modified and even radically transformed the industrial and the every-day landscapes, but it also led to the so-called "information revolution" with which begins the 21 st century.

Environmental and chemical sensors in optical fiber sensor technology The nature of the environment in which we live and work, and the precarious state of many aspects of the natural environment, has been a major lesson for scientists over the last few decades. Public awareness of the issues involved is high, and often coupled with a scepticism of the ability of the scientist and engineer to provide an adequate, or even rapid solution to the preservation of the environment before further damage is done, and to achieve this with a mini­ mum of expenditure. Monitoring of the various aspects of the environment, whether it be external or internal to ourselves and involving chemical, physical or biomedical parameters is an essential process for the well-being of mankind and of the individual. Legis­ lative requirements set new standards for measurement and control all around us, which must be met by the most appropriate of the technologies available, commensurate with the costs involved. Optical fiber sensor technology has a major part to play in this process, both to complement existing technologies and to promote new solutions to difficult measurement issues. The developments in new sources and detectors covering wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, with higher sensitivity, allow the use of techniques that some time ago would have been considered inappropriate or lacking in sufficient sensitivity.

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