This report has been typeset using LaTeX. Most figures have been drawn
using Idraw, the drawing tool in InterViews3.1 package from Stanford. A few
figures requiring additional description on a postscript file have been
edited using Xfig2.1p8. New figures in this revision have been drawn using
Tgif3.0-10. Circuits diagrams have been drawn using Xcircuit, an
electronic circuit drawing tool written by Tim Edwards from Johns Hopkins
University
. Images like
the Lenna's photo have been inserted as compressed postscript outputs from
XV3.10a. Some simulation results from matlab, in an encapsulated postscript
format, may not be printed by some postscript printers. The final .dvi
file has been translated to postscript using dvips5.58f.
This set of tools are known to generate the most compatible postscript output for printing on various postscript printers. Although I had access to other WYSIWYG desktop publishing tools, such as FrameMaker and Interleaf, I did not use them because the postscript output of these tools is not compatible with all postscript printers. Also the printed fonts from LaTeXseem to be more visually pleasing than their counterparts from these WYSIWYG tools.
The HTML format has been directly generated from the latex files using latex2html96.1 written by Nikos Drakos from the University of Leeds. The accompanying html.sty file, which is a style file for including html inside latex files, has also been used for the links that appear in the html format, but not in the postscript format.
The colorful figures are intended not only to make them more visually attractive, but also to help in understanding the concepts. I found it particularly hard to understand some of the figures in the original publications, not just because they were not colorful, but they were either under-described, over-simplified, or over-crowded. I believe ``a picture is worth a thousand words''.
I have tried to force the description of each chip
to start from a new page (using
\pagebreak and \newpage commands).
LaTeX does not provide a well-placed
text and figure when there are too many small sections with many
figures. Starting each section from a new page
has produced some extra blank space in the document, but
has improved the readability and ``figure-finding'' features of the
document.