Academics

Research

Overview

My research is focused on hardware generation starting from high - level languages.

One could expect that the tremendous advance in silicon technology would have imposed appropiate design tools for large systems. The reality is different: Verilog and VHDL (both of them being essentialy netlist languages) are still the "de facto" way of designing hardware. We can take advantage of the circuit modularity (which allows us to build high - level structures, even function specific black box modules). But the result of combining these modules with the user code is a huge netlist. So techmaping, optimization and simulation / verification are still done at netlist level.

To be cynical, I'll say that most design time consists in finding the various tools hidden features / bugs, writting many HDL wrappers ( carefully renaming signals ) and manually verifiying that the tool acctually generated the desired circuit. The user code (ussualy small) can be designed / verified with the classical methods, but the result after placing it in the big design is almost unpredictible. The situation, though hopeless for a theoretician, is not a real barrier for an experienced engineer: a series of pseudo - random experiments is run, and the best design (i.e. the first which seems to work) is kept.

CEC : Columbia Esterel Compiler

The synchronous language Esterel (see www.esterel-technologies.com) can be translated both into hardware and software. The targets are systems where a PERFECTLY corect timing operation is required ( s.a. real-time systems, synch. digital logic, etc.). I am aware that "perfectly correct" is a nonsense, but "almost correct" also is. We are so used with the later so I had to be more specific ...

For the h/w engineer, Esterel is a good choice of describing controllers (i.e. complicated systems involving interconnected state machines; a bus arbitration mechanism is an intuitive sample ).
Briefly, the high level description allows a more concise design; the high level semantics allows more powerfull methods for verification; all these lead to a shorter development time and  to a more robust design. Performance is a delicate issue in compilers / CAD tools: an experienced engineer can do it better "by hand";


I am now working ( under the guidance of my advisor, prof. Stephen A. Edwards ) to a hardware syntetiser from Esterel, which is a part of CEC (Columbia Esterel Compiler). The current version (which includes a h/w synthesiser and a s/w compiler ) can be downloaded at : landc.cs.columbia.edu/projects.html



My wife - Fenchurch

She is charming, has a powerfull Xilinx XC2V2000 FPGA, 10MB ZBT RAM, a lot of video / audio input / output codecs, 100BASE-TX Ethernet, flash memory interface, PS/2 keyboard & mouse ports ... You can see her specs here .

She is my wife because I love her so much and because my department makes desperate efforts to turn us into normal people (so I need a wife, isn't it ? )



Courses, comps and projects

Fall 2002




W4995-02
proj
Languages for Embedded System Design
Stephen A. Edwards

W4231

Analysis of Algortihms
Cliff Stein

W4180
proj
Network Security
Angelos D. Keromytis
Spring 2003




W4203

Graph theory
Jonathan Gross

IEOR6610

Approximation Algorithms
Cliff Stein

W4115
comp
Programming Languages and Translators
Stephen A. Edwards

W4118
comp
Operating Systems I
 Jason Nieh


Note:
 comp : the comprehensive exam was taken, i.e. the course was not attended
 proj : a project was done for the class; you can visit the link