This book results from of a large European project started in 1997, whosegoal is to promote the further development and the faster and wider industrialuse of advanced design methods for reducing the power consumptionof electronic systems.Low power design became crucial with the wide spread of portable informationand communication terminals, where a small battery has to lastfor a long period. High performance electronics, in addition, suffers from apermanent increase of the dissipated power per square millimeter of silicon,due to the increasing clock-rates, which causes cooling and reliability problemsor otherwise limits the performance.The European Union's Information Technologies Programme 'Esprit' didtherefore launch a 'Pilot action for Low Power Design', which eventuallygrew to 19 R&D projects and one coordination project, with an overallbudget of 14 million EURO. It is meanwhile known as European Low PowerInitiative for Electronic System Design (ESD-LPD) and will be completed inthe year 2002. It involves to develop or demonstrate new design methods forpower reduction, while the coordination project takes care that the methods,experiences and results are properly documented and publicised.The initiative addresses low power design at various levels. This includessystem and algorithmic level, instruction set processor level, custom processorlevel, RT-level, gate level, circuit level and layout level. It covers datadominated and control dominated as well as asynchronous architectures. 10projects deal mainly with digital, 7 with analog and mixed-signal, and 2with software related aspects. The principal application areas are communication,medical equipment and e-commerce devices.The following list describes the objectives of the 20 projects. It is sorted bydecreasing funding budget.