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Future research directions in EDA: Dr. Prith Banerjee @ VLSID 2010
Dr. Prith Banerjee, senior VP of research at HP/director, HP Labs.
Dr. Prith Banerjee, senior VP of research at HP and director of HP Labs, discussed some promising areas for research while delivering his keynote on future research directions in EDA at the ongoing VLSID 2010.
He highlighted eight areas that HP Labs is currently working on. These are:
— Digital commercial print
— Content transformation
— Immersive interaction
— Information management
— Analytics
— Cloud
— Intelligent infrastructure
— Sustainability
EDA challenges
So, what are the EDA challenges? According to Dr. Banerjee:
* Today, EDA develops automated tools for designing ICs. However, there is a need to address automation for electronic systems at higher levels.
* There is a proliferation of new modes for communication and collaboration has resulted in the explosion of digital information.
* An intelligent IT infrastructure, which can deliver extremely high performance, adaptability and security — will be the backbone of these developments.
* In future, you need to look at design automation for entire systems.
— networks and data centers
— electronics and photonics
— performance and sustainability
Growth of new modes of communication and collaboration has led to an explosion of digital information. The IT industry would need to develop novel ways to acquire, store, process, and deliver information to customers. An intelligent IT infrastructure, which can deliver extremely high performance, adaptability and security, will be the backbone of these developments.
Intelligent infrastructure
This is required to capture more value via dramatic computing performance and cost improvement. HP Labs’ contribution has been on three big bet projects, namely, next generation data centers, networking and next generation scalable storage. HP Labs’ research contribution has been:
* Exascale
An Exascale data center that will provide 1000X performance while enhancing availability, manageability and reliability and reducing the power and cooling costs. HP Labs is working on the design of a sustainable data center that reduces total cost of operation (TCO) and carbon footprint, while meeting the current quality of service goals.
— Designed across components, interconnects, power and cooling, virtualization, management and software delivery.
* Photonics
— Replace copper with light to transmit data
* 1000X gain in performance
Dr. Banerjee said that there is a need to create brand new optical technologies that can work in exascale. Photonics interconnects make use of light for data communications. The transmit or receive optical bus is a simple modular system in four elements — transmitter media, optical tap, optical source, and optical receiver.
Non volatile memory and storage is another area that HP Labs is working on. Dr. Banerjee highlighted the memristor or a resistor with memory. In future, it has the potential to replace DRAM, hard drives and Flash memory.
“The memristor has the potential to revolutionize electronics,” he added. It is structurally simple and easy to fabricate. Also, it switches in nanoseconds and has many year lifetimes. HP Labs is said to be in discussions with leading memory makers for further.developing and licensing this technology.
Next-generation displays is yet another key research area at HP Labs. These are said to be unbreakable, conformable, ultra-thin and lightweight displays. Such displays have paper like qualities + video capabilities.
Technologies such as memristors, photonic interconnects, and sensors will likely revolutionize the way data is collected, stored and transmitted.
Sustainable data centers is another key research area. Among HP Labs’ research contribution, it is aiming to reduce TCO by 50 percent and carbon footprint by 75 percent.
Highlighting another industry challenge, Dr. Banerjee pointed out that the IT industry is only responsible for 2 percent of total carbon emissions. The global economny contributes the remaining 98 percent of total carbon emissions from other industries such as aviation, transportation, retail, etc. IT has a significant role to play here.
Naturally, all of the research areas would require sophisticated system-level design automation tools. Dr. Banerjee said: “In the past, the EDA research focused on chips. In the future, we need to look at entire systems.”
India needs to develop the right products: Dr. Bobby Mitra @ VLSID 2010
Inaugurating the conference today, wirelessly, along with the other distinguished guests, Dr. Biswadip (Bobby) Mitra, President & Managing Director, Texas Instruments India, said that the technology behind the conference has already started. This year, the conference is being taken to greater heights — VLSID 2010 is being webcasted live for the first time! Dr. Mitra added, “Taking the conference to the people is absolutely wonderful.”
L-R: Dr. Mahesh Mehendale, Dr. Hermann Eul, Dr. Bobby Mitra, Prof. Dimitri A. Antoniadis, Dr. Ruben A. Parekhji, Prof. Niraj Jha and Srivaths Ravi at the VLSID 2010 opening ceremony.
Delivering the opening keynote, Dr. Mitra presented his views on how he foresees the change in India from a VLSI design community to a semiconductor community.
He said: “So far, the industry and the academia have been focused on developing products right. As we enter the new decade, another new vector is likely to become a guiding point — that is, developing the right products. We will be developing better chips for our customers the sooner we can better understand their system aspects.”
He urged the Indian semiconductor/VLSI community to continue developing products right, and also to develop products that really benefit the customer. “Understanding the end application is going to be very vital.”
According to him, India’s growing importance in semiconductors would be critical during this decade. However, India, as a market for semiconductors, will help everyone in learning more — when the customer is at your doorstep. The amount of consumption in semiconductors in India has been amazing so far, and will only grow in future.
He added that companies based in India — both MNCs and local — have been really innovating. India is a not-to-be-missed market! He concluded, “The time to invest in the Indian semiconductor market is now, not later!”
Later, welcoming the delegates, Dr. Mahesh Mehendale, General Co-chair VLSID 2010 and Texas Instruments Fellow & Director, Center of Excellence for Digital Video, Texas Instruments India, said that Bangalore had really emerged as hub for semiconductors and IT. In fact, 2010 indicates 25 years since this revolution started.
Commenting on this year’s conference, he said: “Our aim was to push this conference nationally and globally, by taking the conference to the desktops.” Dr. Ruben A. Parikhji, Program Co-chair, apprised delegates of the technical sessions.
This was followed by two technical keynotes:
* Deep submicron CMOS technology – the challenges for semiconductor IDM, Prof. Dr. Hermann Eul, Member of Management Board, Infineon.
VLSID 2010 to focus on affordable technologies for emerging markets
The 23rd International Conference on VLSI Design and the 9th International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID 2010) will be held at the NIMHANS Convention Center in Bangalore from January 3 to 7, 2010.
Over 700 delegates from India and abroad are likely to participate in this premier VLSI conference. It provides a forum for researchers and designers to present and discuss various aspects of VLSI design, electronic design automation (EDA), enabling technologies and embedded systems.
The first two days of the conference will feature full day tutorials by worldwide experts and the main technical program of the conference will be held on the following three days.
Dr. Biswadip (Bobby) Mitra, President & Managing Director, Texas Instruments India will inaugurate the conference on January 5, 2010.
Dr. Mahesh Mehendale, General Co-Chair VLSID 2010.
I was in conversation with Dr. Mahesh Mehendale, General Co-chair VLSID 2010 and Texas Instruments Fellow & Director, Center of Excellence for Digital Video, Texas Instruments India, and Dr. Srivaths Ravi, General Co-Chair VLSID 2010 and DFT Lead at Texas Instruments India.
According to Dr. Mehendale, this year’s conference has a theme “Affordable Technology for Emerging Markets”. The intent is to focus on what it takes to build low-cost chips and systems for emerging markets and applications. Some of the sessions revolve around this theme.
“We have several eminent keynote speakers this year. To name some of them, we have the father of Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) — Dr. Larry J Hornbeck, Texas Instruments Fellow and inventor, the chip that became the basis for Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology, visiting us this year. He will talk about DMD and DLP. Dr. Walden C Rhines, Chairman & CEO, Mentor Graphics, is another keynote speaker. He will be speaking on ‘Delivering 10X Design Improvements’.”
In terms of coverage, across keynotes, theme sessions, panel and embedded tutorials, the conference has a very high profile program.
On January 3-4, there will be mainly tutorials on these two days. The topics will cover the various aspects of VLSI design. It will also look at testing as an important component.
Dr. Mehendale said: “We are taking the conference to the desktops of the professionals and people who may not be able to attend in person! On days 3, 4, 5 (i.e., the main conference program), we will be webcasting three of the four sessions. We are considering recording the fourth session and make it available for relay later.
Pradeep Chakraborty 