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 Web Site: http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eblock/
The goal of eBlocks is to empower regular people, having no programming or electronics experience, to build basic useful electronic systems around the home, office, store, etc. We plan to achieve our goal by creating a set of embedded system building blocks - eBlocks - that regular people could easily connect together to build a huge variety of basic but useful monitor/controller systems. The key to our approach is to add compute intelligence to components that previously had none - to sensors, switches, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), speakers, etc. Adding compute intelligence to those items was previously cost and power prohibitive, but extremely small, cheap and low power processing devices now make such addition possible. Ideally, people could simply connect such eBlocks together to build basic systems.
We are developing a microprocessor that automatically and transparently detects critical code regions of an executing binary and remaps those regions to FPGA, resulting in 10-100x speedups and energy reductions of 50-90%. The task requires the development of on-chip CAD tools and architecture to support dynamic remapping of software kernels to FPGA. The task will include development of decompilation tools that recover high-level constructs needed for effective synthesis, and of place and route tools specifically created to be exceptionally lean in terms of time and memory, to enable on-chip dynamic execution. The FPGA architecture will be developed in concert with the tools, geared towards enabling lean tools. If successful, this task will lead to software implementations that use 10x less energy and execute 10x-100x faster than standard embedded microprocessors, by bringing FPGAs into mainstream computing. |
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