NEW TRENDS IN PROTOTYPING DESIGN AND AUTOMATION

Recent developments in several other emerging fields enable us to think of the fields of prototype design, development and automation in new ways and to consider new applications. Most notably are the emerging fields on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), modern bio-medical engineering, and the world-wide-web Internet communication technology. For these reasons, we decided at the outset of this symposium to focus on the use of information technology for prototype design, development and automation, and yet to cover a wide variety of novel applications with emphasis on emerging fields of automation. Based on the above principles, we organized this symposium which contains five papers, covering the topics of information extraction for engineering design, predictive models of discrete-event and hybrid systems, process planning automation, and prototyping design of vision sensing systems, microhano systems, and automated DNA sequencing. This overview paper presents trends of prototyping design and automation with an emphasis on the following two subtopics: (1) a review on prototyping discrete event and hybrid systems, and (2) the trends on prototyping real-time machine vision system design. 1