Issues of synchrony, asynchrony, and synchronization, arise frequently
in designing embedded systems from
components, like everyone I knew this for quite a long time. But it
is only recently that it went aware of the diversity of such issues, depending
on the context. The aim of this paper is to show and explain this diversity
by looking at three areas where systems design is of interest, namely:
1/ building software or hardware architectures composed of
components interacting asynchronously, 2/ synchronous hardware design
from IP's, and 3/ designing distributed real-time control systems. A large
part of this paper relies on other people's work, I indicate appropriate
references in
each case.