Speaker Name/Affiliation: Arvind/Massachusetts In

stitute of Technology

Talk Title: Is Hardware Innovation Over?
<

br>Date/Time: April 17 2006 at 3:30 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Refreshments: 4:45 p.m. in the ACES Connector Lobby

Host: Dere

k Chiou & Co-Sponsor by the ECE Distinguished Lecture Series

Talk Ab

stract:
Does the spread of multicore architectures mean the demise
o

f Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC)? Power
constrained h

andheld devices may be one of the most important
economic drivers for t

he semiconductor industry in the coming
decades. Will the future cell p

hone functionality be delivered
primarily through multi-core processors

? Or will it be through
reconfigurable FPGAs or a system composed of he

terogeneous
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 a

nd a variety of specialized hardware
blocks (radios MPEG4 decoders ..

.). Our project will
provide among other things PowerPC ?gateware? f

or others
to use and will shed light on how IP blocks should be writte

n
to be easily modifiable and reusable.

Speaker Bio:
Arvind

is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering at MIT whe

re he has been since 1979. In 1992
his group in collaboration with Mo

torola built the Monsoon
dataflow machines and its associated software

. A dozen of
these machines were built and installed at Los Alamos Nati

onal
Labs and other universities before Monsoon was retired
to the
Computer Museum in California.

In 2000 Arvind took a two-year leav

e of absence to start
Sandburst a fabless semiconductor company to pro

duce a
chip set for 10G-bit Ethernet routers. In 2003 Arvind co-founde

d
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.

In 2001 Dr. R. S. Nikhil and Arvind published the book <

br>Implicit parallel programming in pH. Arvind''s current
research inte

rests are synthesis and verification of large
digital systems described
using Guarded Atomic Actions;
and Memory Models and Cache Coherence P

rotocols for parallel
architectures and languages.