The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1 million grant to Professors Yannis Tsividis of Electrical Engineering (principal investigator) and Steven Nowick of Computer Science (co-principal investigator)
05/07/2010
Categories: Funding, Research
The proposal, entitled "Power-Adaptive, Event-Driven Data Conversion and Signal Processing Using Asynchronous Digital Techniques", addresses the increasing demand for ultra low-power and high-quality microelectronic systems that continuously acquire and process information, as soon as it becomes available. In these applications, new information is generated infrequently, at irregular and unpredictable intervals. This event-based nature of the information calls for a drastic re-thinking of how these signals are monitored and processed.
Traditional synchronous (i.e. clocked) digital techniques, which use fixed-rate operation to evaluate data whether or not it has changed, are a poor match for the above applications, and often lead to excessive power consumption. This research aims instead to provide viable "event-based" systems: controlled not by a clock but rather by the arrival of each event. Asynchronous (i.e. clockless) digital logic techniques, which are ideally suited for this work, are combined with continuous-time digital signal processing, to make this task possible. Such continuous-time data acquisition and processing promises significant power and energy reduction, flexible support for a variety of signal processing protocols and encodings, high-quality output signals, and graceful scalability to future microelectronic technologies. A series of silicon chips will be designed and fully evaluated, culminating in a fully programmable, event-driven data acquisition and signal processing system, which can be used as a testbed for a wide variety of real-world applications.