As the miniaturization of semiconductor technology continues, electronic systems on chips offer a more extensive and more complex functionality with better performance, higher frequencies and less power consumption. Whereas digital designers can take full advantage of the availability of design automation tools to build huge systems, the lack of support by computer programs for different abstraction levels makes analog design a time-consuming handcraft which limits the possibilities to implement large systems. Various approaches for finding optimal values for the parameters of analogcells, like opamps, have been investigated since the mid-1980s, and they have made their entrance in commercial applications. However, a larger impact on the performance is - pected if tools are developed which operate on a higher abstraction level and consider multiple architectural choices to realize a particular functionality. In this book, the opportunities, conditions, problems, solutions and systematic methodologies for this new generation of analog CAD tools are examined. The outline of this book is as follows. In the first part, the characteristics of the analog design process are systematically analyzed and several approaches for automated analog synthesis are summarized. Comparison of their prop- ties with the requirements for high-level synthesis of analog and mixed-signal systems results in a new design paradigm: the high-level design flow based on generic behavior. This design approach involves a modeling strategy using generic behavioral models and a synthesis strategy leading to the exploration of a heterogeneous design space containing different architectures. The modeling strategy is further elaborated in Part II.