Thecomplexityofembeddedsystems-on-a-chipisrapidlygrowing.Di?erentexpertsareinvolvedin the design process: application software designers, programmable core architects, on-chip com- nication engineers, analog and digital designers, deep submicron specialists and process engineers. In order to arrive at an optimum implementation compromises are needed across boundaries of the di?erent domains of expertise. Therefore, the authors of this book take the point of view of the system architect who is a generalist rather than an expert. He is responsible for the de?nition of a high level architecture, whichisgloballyoptimal.Findinganoptimumrequiresaproperbalancebetweenarea,performance and last but not least energy consumption. The challenge is not only the size of the design space but also the fact that the most important decisions are taken during the early design phases. The advantage of an early decision is that the impact on area, performance and energy consumption is large. But the disadvantage is that the available information is often limited, incomplete and inaccurate. The task of the system architect is to take the correct early decisions despite the uncertainties.
Maarten Ditzel was born in Hattem, the Netherlands, on September 15, 1975. For his secondary education he attended the Gymnasium Celeanum in Zwolle and the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt Gymnasium in Amersfoort, where he obtained his diploma in 1993. The same year he started studying Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology. In 1998 he obtained the M.Sc. degree with honors in the field of micro-electronics. His thesis project dealt with the design and implementation of a processor core for a hybrid spread-spectrum transceiver and was carried out in the Circuits and Systems (CAS) group led by Prof. Ralph Otten. In 1998 Maarten started his research towards a Ph.D. degree at Delft University of Technology in the DIOC (Delft Center for Interfaculty Research) program Ubiquitous Communications, which resulted in this dissertation. During his Ph.D. he spent a month at IMEC (Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center), Leuven, Belgium. In addition, he worked for three months as a visiting scientist at Lucent Technologies, Bell-Labs Innovations, Murray-Hill, NJ, USA. Also during his Ph.D. research, he co-founded the student association MEST (Micro-Electronics and Silicon Technology). In October 2003 he was appointed to his current position as a researcher at the Physics and Electronics Laboratory of the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research.
