The Elements of System Design

This work aims to provide a coherent and close packaging of key elements of system design. It was written for those technical leaders who must oversee and guide the development of a complete, complex and cost-constrained system. In today's environment, most companies cannot afford the time or cost to produce a system whose components are separately designed and separately optimized. Trade-offs, led by a system design manager who is cognizant of all the system design disciplines, are necessary for a competitive design cycle. In order to successfully practise this complex process, the authors have developed an approach that integrates the four main elements of system design - signal processing, control, communication and computation. By bringing these four disciplines into close contact, engineers can survey the whole process, study the interplay and evaluate the trade-offs. All this is essential to contemporary, large-scale system design. Problem sets at the end of each chapter aim to solidify the reader's knowledge of the topics covered and make the book suitable as a text as well as a reference. This book should be suitable for system design electrical engineers, system design managers, mathematicians, students in system design and computer engineers.