This book was in the making for many years: from concepts to methodologies to experiments. Many generations of researchers at the Center for Embedded Systems at UCI participated in finding and proving what works and what does
not. We would like to thank the members of the first generation that established basic principles of embedded systems: Frank Vahid, Sanjiv Narayan, Jie Gong
and Smita Bakshi. We would also like to acknowledge the second generation that brought us SpecC and System on Chip Environment: Jianwen Zhu, Rainer Doemer, Lukai Cai, Haobo Yu, Sequin Zhao, Dongwan Shin, and Jerry Peng.
And the third generation that made Embedded System Environment available: Lochi Yu, Hansu Cho, Yongyun Hwang, Ines Viskic. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the NISC team: Mehrdad Reshadi, Bita Gorjiara and Jelena Trajkovic for their high-level synthesis contributions and Pramod Chandraria
for his work on design drivers. We would also like to thank Quoc-Viet Dang, who helped us with book formatting, figure creation, generation, and without whom this book would not be possible. We also want to thank our editors Matt Nelson and Brian Thill who made the sentences readable and ideas flow without interruptions. We also want to thank Simone Lacina from grafikdesign-lacina.de for an excellent and artistic cover.
However, the highest credits go to Grace Wu and Melanie Kilian for making our center work flawlessly while we were working and thinking about the book. Last but not the least, we would like to thank Carl Harris from Springer for encouragement and asking at every conference in the last 5 years the same question: "When is the Orange book coming?"