VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems Commons^™

Wide I/O Dram Architecture Utilizing Proximity Communication, Qawi Ibnzayd Harvard

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The bandwidth and power consumption of dynamic random access memory, used as the main memory of a computer system, impacts the computer’s execution rate even with the existence of a memory hierarchy. DRAM manufacturers focus on density increases due to the innate price per bit decline of main memory while processor manufacturers continually focus on boosting performance by increasing the number of instructions completed per second. This leads to a performance gap between the microprocessor and DRAM.

Proximity communication promises to increase the I/O density of DRAM products while reducing the power consumption of the main memory system. This thesis …

High Contrast Grayscale Object Tracking Embedded System Design, Scott Donald Neally

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of this project is to prove that a real-time object-tracking camera can be implemented using the Digilent NEXYS board with Xilinx Platform Studio. With great ambition I set to implement the camera with RGB color tracking of bright green objects. This would make segmentation between the object of interest and its background much easier, allowing less stringent requirements on the background color beyond the object. Because of time restraints, the actual implementation remains as 8-bit grayscale, where the object of interest is intended to be white and highly contrasted from its black background. A simple algorithm is used …

Phase Change Memory: Array Development And Sensing Circuits Using Delta-Sigma Modulation, Mahesh Balasubramanian

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Chalcogenide based non-volatile Phase Change Memory (PCM) circuits were designed to investigate new emerging non-volatile memory technologies. An overview of the operation of chalcogenide-based resistive PCM for circuit designers is presented. MOSIS fabrication service was used along with Idaho Microfabrication Lab at Boise State University to develop PCM chips. Experimental results show successful integration of two discreet processing services for developing chalcogenide based non-volatile memory circuits. Possible multi-state capabilities were observed during the testing of single memory bits.

Four Delta Sigma Modulation (DSM) based sensing techniques for resistive memory are presented. The proposed sensing techniques have the advantage over traditional …

Where Does Your Institution Stand?, Wendell Brase, Mark Askren

Information Technology Services: Publications

Media coverage of sustainability and "green" issues is hard to ignore these days. But less clear is a specific understanding of what this agenda means within higher ed IT organizations. For starters, it's useful to self-assess whether your campus is a leading innovator on all things "green" or satisfied to remain inconspicuous in the middle of the pack. If your institution is trailing but wants to assert a leadership role in environmental stewardship, you need to get engaged to understand what it will take to catch up and how IT can be a leader, not just a contributor, to such …

Removing Redundant Logic Pathways In Polymorphic Circuits, Hanseok Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Evaluating the quality of software and circuit obfuscators is a research goal of great interest. However, there exists little research about evaluation of obfuscation effectiveness through analyzing and investigating redundancies found in the obfuscated variants. In this research, we consider programs represented as structural combinational circuits and then analyze obfuscated variants of those circuits through a tool that produces functionally equivalent variants based on subcircuit selection and replacement. We then consider how Boolean logic and reduction affects the size and levelization of circuit variants, giving us a concrete metric by which to consider obfuscation effectiveness. To accomplish these goals, we …

Application Specific Customization And Scalability Of Soft Multiprocessors, Deepak C. Unnikrishnan

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Soft multiprocessor systems exploit the plentiful computational resources available in field programmable devices. By virtue of their adaptability and ability to support coarse grained parallelism, they serve as excellent platforms for rapid prototyping and design space exploration of embedded multiprocessor applications. As complex applications emerge, careful mapping, processor and interconnect customization are critical to the overall performance of the multiprocessor system. In this thesis, we have developed an automated scalable framework to efficiently map applications written in a high-level programmer-friendly language to customizable soft-cores. The framework allows the user to specify the application in a high-level language called Streamit. After …

Software Engineering Education At Carnegie Mellon University: One University; Programs Taught In Two Places, Ray Bareiss, Mel Rosso-Llopart

Ray Bareiss

Teaching Software Engineering to professional master’s students is a challenging endeavor, and arguably for the past 20 years, Carnegie Mellon University has been quite successful. Although CMU teaches Software Engineering at sites world-wide and uses different pedagogies, the goal of the curriculum -- to produce world-class software engineers -- remains constant. This paper will discuss two of the most mature versions of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering program -- the main campus program and its “daughter program” at the Silicon Valley Campus. We discuss the programs with respect to the dimensions of curriculum, how students work and learn, how faculty teach, …

Developing Software Engineering Leaders At Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Ray Bareiss, Todd Sedano

Ray Bareiss

The Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley Campus offers a master’s degree in Software Engineering, with technical and development management tracks, targeted at working software professionals in Silicon Valley. We believe the program to be unique in that it is entirely team-based and project-centered. Students learn by doing as they are coached just in time by faculty in the context of their work on authentic projects, and they are evaluated based on what they produce. In response to our interactions with an industry characterized by innovation and short project development timelines, the program evolved from one focused on “high ceremony” processes to …

Developing Software Engineering Leaders At Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Ray Bareiss, Todd Sedano

Todd Sedano

The Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley Campus offers a master’s degree in Software Engineering, with technical and development management tracks, targeted at working software professionals in Silicon Valley. We believe the program to be unique in that it is entirely team-based and project-centered. Students learn by doing as they are coached just in time by faculty in the context of their work on authentic projects, and they are evaluated based on what they produce. In response to our interactions with an industry characterized by innovation and short project development timelines, the program evolved from one focused on “high ceremony” processes to …

Building A Business On Open Source Software, Tony Wasserman

Tony Wasserman

For many years, free and open source software was exclusively associated with the research community, in contrast to the closed source products developed by commercial software vendors. Over the past decade, there has been a vast increase in the availability of open source software, growing from such projects as Linux and Apache. Open source software is being widely adopted in industry, which has led to numerous business opportunities for entrepreneurs and vendors. This activity is having a disruptive effect on the software industry that has affected even the largest software vendors. This paper describes the emergence of open source business, …

Vlsi Implementation Of High Resolution High Speed Low Latency Pipeline Floating Point Adder/Subtractor For Fft Applications, Rozita Teymourzadeh, Burhan Yeop Majlis, Mok Vh, Masuri Othman

Dr. Rozita Teymourzadeh, CEng.