Books Deep and fundamental approach to design theory Theory of technical systems, a total concept theory k)r engineering design V Hubka and W E Eder
Springer, Berlin, FRG (1988) 275pp 275pp A systems approach to design that has been proposed and developed by the authors over many years is presented in this book. The text is a rewrite of Hubka's book Theorie Technischer Systeme published in Germany in 1984. Their aim is to develop and provide a unifying theory of design by its description in systems terms. The text explores this proposition through simple practical problems and a symbolic representation. As the representation and terminology changes through the book (as the theory is advanced)the reader must either be familiar with Hubka and Eder's previous work or have the courage to read on in the knowledge that all will be explained later. The book covers design from its technical details through to considerations of its social and ergonomic consequences. It is therefore of greatest interest to academics engaged in the development of design theories. The text does not address the day-to-day problems of the individual designer but may be of help, within industry, when departmental structures or large product teams are being created and organised. The representation used is basically a 'black-box' process in which 'operands' (those 'things' being worked on) are transformed into a new state by the internal technical process. This process is stimulated by the introduction of human, technical, information and management, and real systems. These together make up the complete transformation system. The inclusion of environmental and commercial issues within the overall transformation system takes this approach
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some way towards a holistic representation of design. The design activity is explained in various levels of abstraction that advances from functional structures through crank to component formation. Techniques for handling and resolving problems at all stages are covered in depth. This book provides the reader with a deep and fundamental ap-
proach to design theory by two authors who are internationally recognized for their work in this field. Whilst its complexity is perhaps daunting to those not familiar with these techniques, the understanding of design, and the ability to apply some of the techniques to real problems, will be the reward for any designer who cares t~ try. A J Medland
Proceedings provide valuable material Proceedings (7[ the 1988 IEEE International Conference on Computer Desi~4n: VLSI in Conrputers and Processors IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA (1988) 618pp On receiving the proceedings of this conference, I was impressed first of all by the tremendous weight of information I had in my hands. This is not the type of book you would want to read while riding on the bus or sitting on a park bench: you would not even want to carry it around in your bag. It is just too heavy. In over 600 pages, most of them covered with miniature style fonts, a selection of 126 papers is presented on almost every area of computer design you can think of. Although time organizers structured the material in four tracks (computer architecture, technology, design and test, and CAD) with a total of .36 sessions, you still get lost when trying to get an overview of the conference. It does not make sense to judge individual papers there are too many. What could have been managed better is the ordering of the papers in the proceedings. If you are
interested in, say, the CAD track, there are about 30 relevant articles distributed in eight sessions. It would have made sense to collect these in a separate chapter. Once you find the pie(es of the CAD track, however, you get a rich variety of topics on analogue synthesis, simulation techniques, high-level and logic synthesis, formal verification methods, interactive system design, physical design methods and silicon compilation. It would not be helpful to list all topics of the remaining three tracks (omputer architecture, technology, and design and test in this review. I would, however, like to mention just a few of them. There are papers on supercomputers, new microprocessors, signal processing, systolic arrays, test generation, error analysis and VLSI implementation of arithmetic algorithms. It seems unlikely that any researcher could be interested in all topics presented, nor even in a small subset of them. Nevertheless, time proceedings should be available in every library, as it provides valuable material for a large group in the computer science community, both in academic and industrial environments. K C Posch
computer-aided design