With the increasing popularization of the Internet, together with the rapid development of 3D scanning technologies and modeling tools, 3D model databases have become more and more common in fields such as biology, chemistry, archaeology and geography. People can distribute their own 3D works over the Internet, search and download 3D...

The application framework of the presented research work is stablished in the area of the low-power portable stand-alone devices. Considering as a paradigm application the implementation of future portable terminals for telecommunications, two opposed trends coexist that determine the need for an optimized energy management. An...

The need for compressed and coded representation and transmission of multimedia data has not rescinded as computer processing power, storage, and network bandwidth have increased. They have merely served to increase the demand for greater quality and increased functionality from all elements in the multimedia delivery and consumption...

Environmental reporting is still in its infancy, having emerged only in the latter part of the 1980s. Companies are under increasing pressure to be transparent and accountable in the whole spectrum of their business. In recent years, a number of companies have seen the need to introduce environmental reporting, placing environmental...

Welcome to the special issue of the International Journal of High Speed Electronics and Systems on "High-Speed Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits". Silicon, in particular MOS silicon, has rapidly become the de facto technology for mixed-signal integrated circuit design due to the high levels of integration possible as device...

This book is the second of two volumes addressing the design challenges associated with new generations of semiconductor technology. The various chapters are compiled from tutorials presented at workshops in recent years by prominent authors from all over the world. Technology, productivity and quality are the main aspects under consideration...

The so-called “green wave”, triggered by a growing ecological awareness, has resulted in an increased interest in herbal formulations throughout the world, particularly in the last decade. The consumption of medicinal plants has almost doubled in the West during that period. The efficacy of a number of herbal formulations...

The most visible use of computers and software is processing information for human consumption. We use them to write books (like this one), search for information on the web, communicate via email, and keep track of financial data. The vast majority of computers in use, however, are much less visible. They run the engine, brakes,...

As we progress into the second decade of the 21st century, it’s becoming increasingly obvious how the computers of the previous 30 years have begun to look not just old but archaic. The massive CRT monitors of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to pencil-thin displays of the 2000s. The...

The evidence continues to mount: melting ice caps, rising temperatures, increasingly frequent natural disasters. As the devastating effects of global warming come into sharper focus, societies must work to both mitigate greenhouse gas...

Event-based distributed systems are playing an ever increasing role in areas such as enterprise management, information dissemination, finance, environmental monitoring and geo-spatial systems. Event-based processing originated with the introduction of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules to database systems in the 1980s. Since then,...