¹ Michael Gabrick, Rick Nicholson, Frank Winters, Bruce Young, Jim Patton, FPGA Considerations for Automotive Applications, 2006 SAE World Congress, Detroit, Michigan, April, 2006. http://delphi.com/pdf/techpapers/2006-01-0368.pdf

² Mechatronics is the synergistic combination of mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and software engineering. The purpose of this interdisciplinary engineering field is the study of automata from an engineering perspective and serves the purposes of controlling advanced hybrid systems. The word itself is a portmanteau of 'Mechanics' and 'Electronics'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechatronics

³ P. Ashenden, G. Peterson, D. Teegarden, The System Designer's Guide to VHDL-AMS: Analog, Mixed-Signal and Mixed-Technology Modeling. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, September 2002. www.mkp.com/vhdl-ams.

⁴ Magneti Marelli Reduces Design and Simulation Time Using Mentor Graphics SystemVision for Safety Function Simulation, http://www.mentor.com/products/sm/news/magneti_marelli.cfm.

⁵ The German consortium VDA FAT-AK30 provides an extensive VHDL-AMS library for the purpose of facilitating model-based collaboration between automotive manufacturers and suppliers. http://fat-ak30.eas.iis.fraunhofer.de/index_en.html

⁶ The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) recently standardized the mechanism for specification of statistical distributions for VHDL-AMS language usage in automotive applications. See SAE standard J2748 at www.sae.org.