Pedro Mejia Alvarez

This book provides a structured and comprehensive pathway through the complexities of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and processes. It focuses on OpenLane and Caravel EDA tools, due to their current major role in the open-source IC design ecosystem. OpenLane provides a robust and flexible platform that automates the entire digital design flow from Register Transfer Level (RTL) to Graphic Data System II (GDSII), making it an ideal tool for teaching and learning the physical design process. Caravel, on the other hand, serves as an open-source System on a Chip (SoC) platform, allowing designers to integrate and test their designs in a versatile, real-world environment. It complements OpenLane by enabling users to package and validate their designs, bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementation. Together, these tools provide a way to understand the full tape-out process in a way that is accessible to students, researchers, and professionals alike.

This book presents the fundamentals of exception handling with examples written in C++ and Python. Starting with its history and evolution, it explores the many facets of exception handling, such as its syntax, semantics, challenges, best practices, and implementation patterns. The book is composed of five chapters: Chapter 1 provides an introduction, covering the history, various definitions, and challenges of exception handling. Chapter 2 then delves into the basics, offering insights into the foundational concepts and techniques. Subsequently, chapter 3 touches upon the best practices for exception handling, including the differences between errors and exceptions, the use of assertions, and how to provide meaningful error messages. Chapter 4 takes a deep dive into advanced exception-handling techniques, exploring e.g. patterns, guard clauses, and hierarchical exception handling. Eventually, chapter 5 focuses on the complexities of exception handling in real-time and embedded systems. This book is mainly written for both students and professionals. Its readers will understand the nuances between syntax and semantic errors, learn how to employ try-catch blocks effectively, grasp the importance of logging exceptions, and delve into advanced exception-handling techniques. This way, they will be enabled to handle exceptions effectively and thus write more robust, reliable, and resilient code.

This book provides an overview of both experimental and commercial real-time database systems (RTDBs) and a systematic approach to understanding, designing, and implementing them. To this end, the book is composed of four chapters: Chapter 1 “An Overview of Real-Time Database Systems” delves into the realm of RTDBs and discusses the specific requirements, transaction models, and scheduling algorithms that set RTDBs apart from conventional DBMs. Chapter 2 on “Experimental Real-Time Databases” presents various experimental RTDBs developed in academia with their architectures, features, and implementations, while chapter 3 on “Commercial Real-Time Databases” does so for systems developed and offered by commercial vendors as products or services. Eventually, chapter 4 on “Applications of Real-Time Database Systems” showcases various applications of RTDBs across different domains. This book will help researchers, graduate students and advanced professionals to get anoverview of the area and to understand the main challenges and systems available.

This book provides basic knowledge about main memory management in relational databases as it is needed to support large-scale applications processed completely in memory. In business operations, real-time predictability and high speed is a must. Hence every opportunity must be exploited to improve performance, including reducing dependency on the hard disk, adding more memory to make more data resident in the memory, and even deploying an in-memory system where all data can be kept in memory. The book provides one chapter for each of the main related topics, i.e. the memory system, memory management, virtual memory, and databases and their memory systems, and it is complemented by a short survey of six commercial systems: TimesTen, MySQL, VoltDB, Hekaton, HyPer/ScyPer, and SAP HANA.

In this book, the interrupt handling models used by several operating systems are introduced and compared. We begin with an analysis of the classical interrupt management model used by Unix, followed by the schemes used by modern networked environments. We highlight the key challenges of each of these models and how these have been solved by modern operating systems and the research community. Then we analyze the architectures used for general purpose and embedded real-time operating systems.