Plenary Speakers
- Brent Nelson » Productivity Issues in FPGA Application Development
- Ian Philips » The Colour of Embedded Computation
- Chris Phillips » Resiliency in Elemental Computing
Productivity Issues in FPGA Application Development
As we near 20 years of history with reconfigurable computing there is continued (and even increasing) interest in design productivity for RC. Configurable computing machines (CCMs) based on FPGAs are touted as re-usable, re-configurable platforms for accelerated computing, but the fact remains that FPGAs are simply not that easy to "program", even after all this time. Why? The usual list of suspects is familiar to most, and includes challenges with timing closure, gate-level design, fixed-point arithmetic analysis, communication management, and clock cycle level control of design resources, to name a few.
Brent Nelson is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University and program head for the Computer Engineering program there.
The Colour of Embedded Computation
Categories and classifications, like acronyms, are useful shortcuts to facilitate discussion and decision. Yet their use is frequently subsumed by business interests to become objects or objectives in their own right. So used, they subtly mislead and constrain the thought process: Not only of the many who can afford to be be enticed by the bejewelled shell; but of greater import, of the scientists whose role is to create the viable technology within. In this presentation the author will explore some of the common shortcuts prevalent in the area of microelectronic systems, to identify limitations caused by their commercial adoption, and in consequence the research avenues and business opportunities in danger of being overlooked.
Ian Phillips is Principal Staff Engineer at ARM Ltd, UK where he reports to the Board, with responsibility for strategic technology issues.
Resiliency in Elemental Computing
This presentation describes a new reconfigurable architecture that lends itself to parallelizable applications such as Software-Defined Radio, while providing a new level of reliability, called resiliency. The architecture is called an Elemental Computing Array (ECA). At run time, code is dynamically placed into the ECA elements to work around defects on a device whether they were fabrication defects or came about later due to device wear out. Resiliency extends the useful lifetime of products and allows for graceful system degradation instead of catastrophic failure. The ECA combines four computational styles: sequential, data-flow, message-passing, and DMA in a rapidly-reconfigurable distributed system on a chip.
Chris Phillips is VP of Engineering at ElementCXI where he is working on dynamic reconfigurable computing systems.
