My Background
I officially graduated from
MIT
on June 6, 1997, recieving my BS and
Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) in
Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science.
I was here for four years as an undergraduate and one year as a graduate
student. Phew, it seemed more like ten years. Now, I am at greener pasteurs, literally speaking, in
Texas, working as a Design Automation Engineer in the DA group
at Cyrix Corporation, in
Richardson, TX. They design alternative, Intel-compatible
chips. I am currently responsible for the design and
implementation of a software tool called SQuID, which will
check circuit designs for design rule violations specified by
the clients. I have been working there since February 9, 1998
and can still be reached at the e-mail address at the bottom.
My (Former) Research
I worked for the
Information Mechanics Group
.
At IM, I have been experimenting with simulating reconfigurable logic
circuitry
on CAM-8. A
cellular automaton is a grid of finite state machines which change state
according to the state of their neighbors.
With appropriate rules, the cellular automaton can be thought of as
a substrate which can be configured as a logic circuit. You simply
lay out your circuit on the grid of cells and run the rule. The cellular
automaton will simulate signals which travel between cells and each cell has
a fixed set of logic, programmed at the start which can do
routing, logic, and storage
functions. This is similar to what is done in an FPGA where there is a fixed
set of programmable logic blocks with programmable interconnect. Each cell
can simply be thought of as a programmable logic block.
For more information on this, see my paper Cellular Automata Logic Simulations. Here are some specific circuits which have been laid out and simulated in CAM-8.
I am also
experimenting with various techniques for synthesizing reconfigurable logic
circuits.
More specifically,
I am using a technique called spacetime wires for simulating reconfigurable
logic faster on CAM-8. The idea behind spacetime wires is that you lay out
your circuits in both space and time. Looking at one particular cell through
time, the logic function may exhibit a time evolution along with the data.
This is similar to dynamically reconfigurable logic
or virtual logic.
Prototypes
of chips which operate in this way have recently been fabricated for the
first time and are known as dynamically programmable gate arrays (DPGA's). This
chip was fabricated under the Reinventing Computing initiative at the AI lab. All
of this type of research can be useful to the notion of
reconfigurable computing.
Since CAM-8 updates cells in this fashion already, by time-multiplexing its LUT's among
the cells which are stored in DRAM, it is suited to perform these types of
computations optimally. In addition, there are other issues. CAM-8 supports
multidimensional simulations and is indefinitely extensible in three
dimensions. So, for instance, three dimensional chips can be simulated. The
data transport is also unique and provides some challenging research issues
in placement and routing. There are many other issues that need to be dealt
with as well. The topic of my master's thesis is finding a way to synthesize
logic for efficient simulation on CAM-8 and I must look at all these issues.
One of the major motivating factors behind all this is that cellular automata
are ideal candidates for microscopic architectures. That is, as device
dimensions shrink and devices get packed closer and closer, interconnect will
be harder to fabricate (as well as being tighter) and logic functionality will
have to be more compressed. Nanotechnology
is already working on generic solutions to exploiting nature to make ultra-small devices. Since CA represent nearest-neighbor interconnect, there is no wiring necessary, and the smaller one can make the logic cells, the more cells we
can fit into a grid. CA are fine-grained enough to be ideal parallel
architectures for making reconfigurable logic.
For the past two summers, I worked at
Texas Instruments in the
Nanoelectronics Group.
People to See
- Hank Eng
- David Harris
- Grant Ho
- Rob Ristroph
- Bob Steinhoff
- Hao Tang
- LeMoey Wiebush
Places to Go
- The Nanoelectronics and Nanocomputing Home Page
- NDR Group Homepage (Nanoelectronics)
- PhysComp '96
- Design Automation
Links
- UCBerkeley Design Technology Warehouse
- Quantum Computation References
- Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio
- MIT AI Lab Reinventing Computing
- MIT AI Lab Reversible Computing Project
Ruben Agin
Last modified: Tue Sep 8 16:25:29 CDT