Research Report - Digital Systems
This research addresses two major problems of digital system design:
1. Reducing the design time of complex digital systems
2. Reducing the time required to execute computational tasks
Reducing the design time of complex systems has become one of the most urgent problems in digital design practice and research. Electronic products have grown tremendously in complexity and there is a constant demand for new and more advanced products. Computer tools for automation of lower level hardware design tasks are commercially available but there is a growing demand for automatic conversion of functional and behavioural specifications to working hardware. This would not only allow a designer to delegate the tedious and error prone tasks to a computer but also to concentrate on the system design and experiment with different system solutions. This area is targeted by staff and students working on automatic synthesis of hardware from behavioural specification. The main problems studied are synthesis of memory configurations and pipelining of operations that lead to better performance.
The hardware is only a part of a digital system. The software is often as demanding and as crucial to the system performance as hardware. The most important design decisions are made by designers when the system is partitioned into hardware and software parts. At present, designers do not have much support in this difficult task and there is a growing demand for automated or interactive tools supporting partitioning, performance estimation and performance optimisation. Hardware-software codesign research in this group is focused on the development of methods and tools allowing designers to optimise interaction of hardware and software into their designs.
Modern computers are becoming more and more powerful but there are always many problems which could be executed more quickly than a general purpose computer is currently able to do. In fact, the demand for computing performance in scientific computations and optimisation of designs in different fields of engineering is outgrowing the rate of performance improvement of general purpose computers. There are many computational tasks that arise so frequently that it is worthwhile considering the development of special purpose computers designed to execute such tasks. Special purpose architectures can provide the highest speeds of all (for a given cost) and the development of those architectures is a rapidly growing area. Special computer architectures combined with reprogramming capability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays allow for a new way of tackling complex computational problems. A future computer can be viewed as a reconfigurable interconnection of specialised processors optimised for specific, although often executed, tasks. The research in this department is concentrated on the architectural and software issues of specialised computers.
Another approach to the reduction of computation time that is being investigated in our school is rather more fundamental and concerns the study of the basic computational devices themselves (e.g. MOSFET transistors). A number of investigations are underway which are aimed at gaining a greater understanding of both the fabrication process and the operational behaviour of semiconductor devices employed in computational systems. Such research leads to improving both the materials and technological processes and as a result improving the performance of computational devices.
Associated Staff
Prof Neil Bergmann
Mr Robin Burton
Mr Richard Cocks
Prof Tom Downs
Dr Marcus Gallagher
Dr Adam Postula
Dr Mark Schulz
Dr Peter Sutton
Dr Gordon Wyeth
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