Building
 CSE
 LIS

Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing
Reconfigurable Systems

The primary impetus for the dramatic advances in computing power over the past 30 years has been advances in computer hardware. Despite these advances, computing hardware is still in its infancy. The future holds incredible possibilities, many of which we are pursuing in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington.

We are researching how to make computing devices ubiquitous, meaning that we are developing ways to make computer electronics and computation an integral part of all manufactured goods. These embedded computing systems will revolutionize the way we work, communicate, and play. The long-term future promises even more profound changes. Implantable electronics will revolutionize medicine. Reconfigurable computing will replace dedicated hardware with robust, multi-use electronics. Smart chips will adapt and learn locally, to enable truly smart systems. Quantum computers hold the promise of exponential scaling in computer power. The UW CSE Department pioneered VLSI and CAD research starting in the 1980's, and continues its pioneering research today.

Mark OskinMark Oskin

WaveScalar Architecture

WaveScalar is a dataflow instruction set architecture and execution model designed for scalable, low-complexity/high-performance processors. WaveScalar is unique among dataflow architectures in efficiently providing traditional memory semantics. At last, a dataflow machine can run ``real-world'' programs, written in any language, without sacrificing parallelism.

 Carl Ebeling
Carl Ebeling

Reconfigurable Systems

Our research is focussed making reconfigurable systems accessible to the applications designers, not just hardware designers.  Our research plan comprises four primary components:
A computation model for hybrid architectures that comprises both a sequential processor and a reconfigurable engine
C programming language extensions that allow a programmer to write programs using this computation model
A compiler backend that maps programs written to coarse-grained configurable computing substrate
An efficient coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture that implements our model and is amenable to automatic compilation
Gaetano Borriello
Gaetano Borriello

Embedded Systems

The Portolano project seeks to create a testbed for investigation into the emerging field of invisible computing. Invisible computing is a term invented by Donald Norman to describe the coming age of ubiquitous task-specific computing devices. The devices are so highly optimized to particular tasks that they blend into the world and require little technical knowledge on the part of their users.

Chris Diorio
Chris Diorio

Biologically Inspired Computing

Research in the Silicon Adaptive Systems lab focuses on building electronic systems inspired by the breadth of computational and organizational principles used in the nervous systems of living organisms.