Distinguished Lecturer Series
A tinker-toy approach to building Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC)
Arvind
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Friday, March 3, 2006
10:30am - SENSQ 5317
Refreshments at 10:00am
Hosted by Rami Melhem
Abstract
Power constrained, handheld devices may be the one of the most important economic drivers for the semiconductor industry in the coming decades. Will the future cell phone functionality be delivered primarily through multi-core processors? Or will it be through reconfigurable FPGAs or a system composed of heterogeneous blocks? We will describe how it is possible to synthesize, quickly and efficiently, large and complex SoC's from a library of microarchitectural IP blocks, including embedded PowerPC models, DSPs and a variety of specialized hardware blocks (radios, MPEG4 decoders, ...). Our project, will provide, among other things, PowerPC "gateware" for others to use, and will shed light on how IP blocks should be written to be easily modifiable and reusable.
Biography of Speaker
Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Before joining MIT in 1979, he taught at the University of California, Irvine, and IIT, Kanpur(77-78). Arvind graduated from IIT, Kanpur, in 1969 and did his M.S.(72) and Ph.D.(73) at the University of Minnesota. In 1992, Arvind's group, in collaboration with Motorola, completed the Monsoon dataflow machine and its associated software. A dozen of these machines were built and installed at Los Alamos National Labs and other universities, before Monsoon was retired to the Computer Museum in California. In 2000, Arvind took a two-year leave of absence to start Sandburst, a fabless semiconductor company to produce a chip set for 10G-bit Ethernet routers. He served as its President until his return to MIT in September 2002. In 2003, Arvind co-founded Bluespec Inc., an EDA company to produce a set of tools for high-level synthesis. He currently serves on the board of both Sandburst and Bluespec. Arvind has served on the editorial board of numerous journals and has also chaired many conferences. From 1986-92, he was the Chief Technical Advisor for the UN sponsored Knowledge Based Computer Systems project in India. During 1992-93 Arvind was Fujitsu Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo. In 2001, Dr. R. S. Nikhil and Arvind published the book "Implicit parallel programming in pH". Arvind is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of ACM. He has received IEEE's Charles Babbage Award and University of Minnesota's and I.I.T., Kanpur's distinguished Alumni awards. Arvind's current research interests are synthesis and verification of large digital systems described using Guarded Atomic Actions; and Memory Models and Cache Coherence Protocols for parallel architectures and languages.