Montek Singh
Location: (Chapel Hill, NC)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~montek/
Keywords: asynchronous (i.e., clockless) circuits and systems; mixed-timing and GALS systems; on-chip networks (NOCs); high-performance and low-power systems; VLSI CAD; high-level synthesis; silicon compilation; and novel low-power graphics architectures.
Posted on: Monday, June 8th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Graphics / Visualization, Hardware / Architecture
Research Interests:
My research interests are in the area of asynchronous (i.e. clockless) and mixed-timed circuits and systems.
Specifically, I am interested in design and test of asynchronous systems, including: (i) high-level specification and translation; (ii) performance analysis; (iii) system-level optimization, including bottleneck detection and alleviation; (iv) mapping to asynchronous pipelined circuits; and (v) test and testability issues.
In addition to pure asynchronous systems, I am interested in mixed-timed systems as well, including globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous systems (GALS), latency-insensitive design, elastic systems (both synchronous and asynchronous), and on-chip-networks (NOCs).
My research group actively pursues work at various levels of abstraction: from circuit level (asynchronous pipeline circuits), to microarchitecture level, to system level. The work also targets several application areas in high-speed and low-power computing.
A particular area of research interest is mobile low-power graphics hardware. In collaboration with Prof. Anselmo Lastra, we are developing architectural techniques for ultra-low-power graphics, suitable for handheld gaming devices, cell phones, PDAs, etc. An active line of investigation is to dynamically trade off solution quality for energy savings when energy conservation is critical. This project also targets several levels of design abstraction: circuit, microarchitecture, system, memory, and software.
Finally, I am interested in exploring the application of asynchronous design techniques for the next-generation silicon and non-silicon emerging technologies, such as nano, quantum and biologically-inspired computing.
