Change your chip’s functionality without having to go to the foundry to bake new ones and making a new processor in microseconds rather than years. That’s what Mihai Sima is trying to do, and the Dutch electronics company Philips is funding these changeable chips for their digital televisions.
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“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a processor which can be metamorphosed by the customer to play the role of a general-purpose processor to run a text editor, or the role of a media processor to watch a DVD movie on the display? Well, that’s what our approach does: in microseconds a processor is metamorphosed to do what the manufactors desire,” says Mihai Sima, a TU PhD student from Romania, who last year won the IEEE International conference’s best paper award for computer design.
“I’m not trying to improve the PC’s Pentium processor. Philips develops its own processor, aimed to be the brain of future multimedia systems,” says Sima, who primarily conducts his research at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven. “Pentium processors can be sold on an huge market; everybody has one, even me, and it’s therefore affordable to build a specific circuit. But for making TV’s, for example, there are lots of competitors and the market isn’t as large as the market for Pentiums. Consequently, a specific circuit may result in a higher price per chip.
In reconfigurable processors, designer decisions regarding the processor functionality are no longer a constraint for different types of applications. “This way you can produce chips in large batches in the same manufacturing line.” Because Sima works for Philips, he can’t reveal exact numbers. But making many chips at the same time and then making small changes later on to meet new requirements does indeed make it less expensive to make chips, because it’s possible to produce more chips than needed at that particular moment.
CD-player
Sima is working on the integration of a fixed chip and a changeable chip, generally referred to as a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Such a chip contains tiny computing cells interconnected by crossbars that can switch on and off, thereby pushing the electrons one way or the other. “The beauty is that the changes can be performed under software control.”
With hybrids, flexibility is gained, but, compared to a specific circuit, speed is lost. Completely fixed processors, like in CD-players, are of the highest speed but cannot be used in other systems. A hybrid provides the freedom to define and implement new functionalities that couldn’t be predicted at the time the hybrid was manufactured.
“We chose to embed FPGA as a functional unit. That means that it’s under the direct control of the main processor during every step it takes.” Doing this is no easy task, however. “I try to find out how large the metamorphic part must be. And I look at which part of the software is best run on the FPGA and which part on the fixed one.” To prove that a metamorphic processor is imbedded in the correct manner, Sima writes applications for digital televisions, like, for example, a MPEG-decoder. “I play a double role. Nowadays you have to be both a hardware and software designer; you can’t be only one anymore.”
Change your chip’s functionality without having to go to the foundry to bake new ones and making a new processor in microseconds rather than years. That’s what Mihai Sima is trying to do, and the Dutch electronics company Philips is funding these changeable chips for their digital televisions.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a processor which can be metamorphosed by the customer to play the role of a general-purpose processor to run a text editor, or the role of a media processor to watch a DVD movie on the display? Well, that’s what our approach does: in microseconds a processor is metamorphosed to do what the manufactors desire,” says Mihai Sima, a TU PhD student from Romania, who last year won the IEEE International conference’s best paper award for computer design.
“I’m not trying to improve the PC’s Pentium processor. Philips develops its own processor, aimed to be the brain of future multimedia systems,” says Sima, who primarily conducts his research at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven. “Pentium processors can be sold on an huge market; everybody has one, even me, and it’s therefore affordable to build a specific circuit. But for making TV’s, for example, there are lots of competitors and the market isn’t as large as the market for Pentiums. Consequently, a specific circuit may result in a higher price per chip.
In reconfigurable processors, designer decisions regarding the processor functionality are no longer a constraint for different types of applications. “This way you can produce chips in large batches in the same manufacturing line.” Because Sima works for Philips, he can’t reveal exact numbers. But making many chips at the same time and then making small changes later on to meet new requirements does indeed make it less expensive to make chips, because it’s possible to produce more chips than needed at that particular moment.
CD-player
Sima is working on the integration of a fixed chip and a changeable chip, generally referred to as a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Such a chip contains tiny computing cells interconnected by crossbars that can switch on and off, thereby pushing the electrons one way or the other. “The beauty is that the changes can be performed under software control.”
With hybrids, flexibility is gained, but, compared to a specific circuit, speed is lost. Completely fixed processors, like in CD-players, are of the highest speed but cannot be used in other systems. A hybrid provides the freedom to define and implement new functionalities that couldn’t be predicted at the time the hybrid was manufactured.
“We chose to embed FPGA as a functional unit. That means that it’s under the direct control of the main processor during every step it takes.” Doing this is no easy task, however. “I try to find out how large the metamorphic part must be. And I look at which part of the software is best run on the FPGA and which part on the fixed one.” To prove that a metamorphic processor is imbedded in the correct manner, Sima writes applications for digital televisions, like, for example, a MPEG-decoder. “I play a double role. Nowadays you have to be both a hardware and software designer; you can’t be only one anymore.”
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