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MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
EECS Event |
Thursday, November 30, 2000
3:30 PM (reception 3:15)
Edgerton Hall, Room 34-101
LCS Distinguished Lecture
Abstract
System-on-a-chip design has constraints and optimization constraints which are fundamentally different from those criteria that have in the past driven board or back plane level system implementations. In particular, the motivation for software based solutions based on a conventional processor model is becoming increasingly inappropriate. When software based solutions are compared to silicon based architectures which can more effectively exploit the parallelism of applications, it is found that there is an inefficiency in power, area and performance which is easily multiple orders of magnitude. The advantage of complete flexibility which is the justification for such inefficiency can be achieved in other ways, at least for the level of flexibility required for typical system-on-a-chip implementations.
The domain of wireless systems will be used to define what is meant by a system-on-a-chip and used to demonstrate the issues and what is involved in design of such circuits. This area is becoming increasingly important as there is an ever widening range of requirements from the high bandwidth needs of multimedia internet access to the ultra low power needs of sensor data networks.
Bio: He received his PhD from MIT in 1972 and then was with the Central Research Laboratory at Texas Instruments for 3 years. Following that, he joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now the John Whinnery Professor of Electrical Engineering. In addition to teaching, he is involved in research involving new applications of integrated circuits, which is focused in the areas of low power design and wireless communications; and the CAD tools necessary to support these activities.
He has won best paper awards for a number of journal and conference papers in the areas of integrated circuit design, CAD and communications, including in 1979 the W.G. Baker award for the best IEEE publication in all areas. In 1982 he became a Fellow of the IEEE and in 1983, he was co-recipient of the IEEE Morris Liebmann award. In 1986 he received the Technical Achievement awards in the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and in 1991 from the Signal Processing Society. In 1988 he was elected to be member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1996 he was the winner of the IEEE Solid State Circuits award and in 1997 he was the recipient of the Technical Achievement award from SIGMOBILE and in 1999 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund in Sweden and in 2000 received a Millenium award from the IEEE and the Golden Jubilee award from the Circuits and Systems Society.