ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the integrated circuit design process, its major stages and design flow, and how electronic design automation tools fit into these processes and flows. It also discusses the major approaches to specify and model systems, and the languages and tools in this domain. The book describes dynamic power management approaches, aimed at selectively stopping or slowing down resources, whenever this is possible while still achieving the required level of system performance. It offers state-of-the-art specification languages, tools, and methodologies for processor development used in academia and industry. The book explains the use of standard benchmarks, and instruction set simulators, to evaluate processor cores. It explores how to use system-level modeling approaches at the cycle-accurate micro-architectural level to do final design architecture iterations and ensure conformance to timing and performance specifications.
