First Day of Research at MSU

I arrived at MSU this morning and continued to work on tutorials and examples in SystemC and VHDL. Professor Zhong scheduled a meeting at 2:00 PM.

Research articles can be found at IEEE Xplore and ACM.org Portal. These two sites will provide additional information that is needed to research System-on-Chip designs and methods.

Professor Zhong suggested that I start with designing simple machines such as an array of ALUs. The two approaches are:

1. Model approach - SystemC, VHDL, Verilog (see Jimmy)
2. Prototype approach - FPGA, microBLAZE (embedded processor), MSP430

Modeling is better to start with first because the prototype/hardware approach would require too much reading of reference material before interesting results could be evaluated.

The overall goal is to study the Adaptive SoC design. It would use an embedded processor for most of computations, but hardware would be designed to handle processes that would benefit from parallelism. One example would be an MPEG decoder in hardware, which is more desirable than in software because of the continuous computation required.

Two questions were posed:

1. How to model concurrent processing?
2. How to model communication (channels, ports, etc...)?

I was encouraged to invent a process that uses several computers. The process would be light-weight and could be as basic as a few multipliers.

Professor Zhong also spoke about future topics that I would be able to pursue. One such topic was applications in signal analysis. It would look at a wireless sensor network. An example of research in this area would be to answer: "How to process data that requires significant computation time?". Aspects of fine-grain parallelism would play a role in this research. Also energy modeling would be of interest. Another topic suggested was Nanoscale devices and fabrication techniques.