Introduction

Abstract

Over the last decades electronic systems have become more and more AQ1 important. Nowadays, they play a major role for example in communication, consumer electronic and safety–critical applications. From the design perspective this leads to very diverse requirements. For instance, a design aspect is high computing power as in case of personal computers. For mobile devices like modern cell phones or PDAs rich functionality is the central aspect. In contrast, for safety–critical systems as for example found in automobiles, airplanes or medical devices the design correctness is most important.

Overall the growth of electronic systems is due to the continued advance in the fabrication technology of integrated circuits. As predicted by Gordon Moore in 1965 the number of transistors per chip doubles every 18 months. This exponential growth leads to huge problem instances that have to be handled during the design of a system. For example, Intel has been able to build a processor consisting of 2 billion transistors: Tukwila is scheduled for production in the first quarter of 2010 [Int09].