Plenary Speakers

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.

Also covered will be a description of the implementation of key algorithms of Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) on the new ECA reconfigurable architecture. OFDM is an essential technology for current and next generation standards such as 3G/4G, WiMax, and digital broadcasting standards. The implementation of these kinds of standards on the ECA architecture will be covered, as well as implementation of compute-intensive smart antenna techniques such as beamforming, MIMO, and maximum likelihood (ML) detection .

Chris Philips

Chris Philips is VP of Engineering at ElementCXI where he is working on dynamic reconfigurable computing systems.

His interests are in high performance computing, parallel processing, silicon architectures, and design tools. He holds over 25 patents in the design of microprocessors, FPGAs, reconfigurable computing systems and CAD EDA tools and has approximately 20 published papers in this field. Mr Phillips received Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; McMullen Scholar and has 25+ years in systems applications, micro-architectures, logic design, silicon level circuit design, algorithm invention, high level/assembly language programming, and in writing code scripts. Previously, Chris Phillips co-founded Tiger Semiconductor, Leopard Logic and Chameleon Systems and held engineering and management positions at National Semiconductor Corporation (clean room 486; COP444C - everyone in the US has at least 3 of these microcontrollers in their home), Summit Design, DaSys (pioneered behavioral synthesis) and Crosspoint Solutions. Chris has brought to market more than 20 fully-functional-at-first-silicon devices. Chris graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; McMullen Scholar.