CENG SEMINAR SERIES

"SOFTWARE DEFINED SIGNAL PROCESSING"Prof. Ryan KastnerUC, Santa BarbaraAbstract:The vision of ubiquitous connectivity is gradually becoming a reality with the development and deployment of cellular, Wi-Fi (802.11x) and even underwater wireless networks. However, many important challenges remain before true universal access is achieved. Among them is the development of hardware that can implement these increasingly complex communication protocols. Ideally, the hardware platform will provide a mechanism for multimode, multi-band, and multifunctional wireless communication. All the functions of this "software defined" communication device, except the front end of the receiver/transmitter (e.g. antenna and RF power amplifier), are implemented in changeable code. This requires an efficient and flexible high performance platform. The performance and flexibility of reconfigurable computing systems make them ideal platform for software defined signal processing. In order to realize a software-defined signal processing system, we must develop tools and methodologies to can automatically map communication protocols to hardware. In this talk, I will describe some of our research aimed at providing signal processing application designers with basic tools that allow them to quickly map their protocols into reconfigurable hardware. I will present a design flow from high level application specification to a bitstream that can be used to program a modern, high performance FPGA. Our design flow is unique in that it treats the FPGA as a two dimensional array of configurable data paths. As such, the distribution of the application data plays a large role in the performance of the application mapping. I will discuss our optimizations for partitioning data across the complex memory hierarchy seen in modern reconfigurable architectures. To motivate our design flow, I will discuss our recent work on implementing two signal processing applications on a high performance FPGA - radiolocation algorithms for RF (802.11x) and underwater acoustic modems.Bio:Ryan Kastner is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a PhD in Computer Science (2002) at UCLA, a masters degree in engineering (2000) and bachelor degrees (BS) in both electrical engineering and computer engineering (1999), all from Northwestern University. His current research interests lie in the realm of embedded systems, in particular reconfigurable computing, compilers and sensor networks. Professor Kastner has published close to 50 journal and conference papers, and is the author of the book, "Synthesis Techniques and Optimizations for Reconfigurable Systems" (with Majid Sarrafzadeh and Adam Kaplan), available from Kluwer Academic Publishing. He is a member of numerous conference technical committees including International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), Design Automation Conference (DAC), International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI), the Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms (ERSA) and the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS). He serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Embedded Computing.Host: Prof. Viktor Prasanna, Ext. 04483

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - -132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Rosine Sarafian