System designers, computer scientists and engineers have c- tinuously invented and employed notations for modeling, speci- ing, simulating, documenting, communicating, teaching, verifying and controlling the designs of digital systems. Initially these s- tems were represented via electronic and fabrication details. F- lowing C. E. Shannon’s revelation of 1948, logic diagrams and Boolean equations were used to represent digital systems in a fa- ion that de-emphasized electronic and fabrication detail while revealing logical behavior. A small number of circuits were made available to remove the abstraction of these representations when it was desirable to do so. As system complexity grew, block diagrams, timing charts, sequence charts, and other graphic and symbolic notations were found to be useful in summarizing the gross features of a system and describing how it operated. In addition, it always seemed necessary or appropriate to augment these documents with lengthy verbal descriptions in a natural language. While each notation was, and still is, a perfectly valid means of expressing a design, lack of standardization, conciseness, and f- mal definitions interfered with communication and the understa- ing between groups of people using different notations. This problem was recognized early and formal languages began to evolve in the 1950s when I. S. Reed discovered that flip-flop input equations were equivalent to a register transfer equation, and that xvi tor-like notation. Expanding these concepts Reed developed a no- tion that became known as a Register Transfer Language (RTL).

VLSI Specification, Verification and Synthesis Proceedings of a workshop held in Calgary from 12-16 January 1987. The collection of papers in this book represents some of the discussions and presentations at a workshop on hardware verification held in Calgary, January 12-16 1987. The thrust of the workshop was to give the floor to a few leading researchers involved in the use of formal approaches to VLSI design, and provide them ample time to develop not only their latest ideas but also the evolution of these ideas. In contrast to simulation, where the objective is to assist in detecting errors in system behavior in the case of some selected inputs, the intent of hardware verification is to formally prove that a chip design meets a specification of its intended behavior (for all acceptable inputs). There are several important applications where formal verification of designs may be argued to be cost-effective. Examples include hardware components used in "safety critical" applications such as flight control, industrial plants, and medical life-support systems (such as pacemakers).

In our digital world, integrated circuits are present in nearly every moment of our daily life. Even when using the coffee machine in the morning, or driving our car to work, we interact with integrated circuits. The increasing spread of information technology in virtually all areas of life in the industrialized world offers a broad range of attack vectors. So far, mainly software-based attacks have been considered and investigated, while hardware-based attacks have attracted comparatively little interest.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on From Data Models and Back, DataMod 2020, held virtually, in October 2020.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on From Data Models and Back, DataMod 2020, held virtually, in October 2020.

Among the most important problems confronting computer science is that of developing a paradigm appropriate to the discipline. Proponents of formal methods - such as John McCarthy, C.A.R. Hoare, and Edgar Dijkstra - have advanced the position that computing is a mathematical activity and that computer science should model itself after mathematics.