The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington has been engaged in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) research, development, and education since the late 1970's. Today, the Northwest Laboratory for Integrated Systems is the focus of a wide variety of VLSI, embedded sytems, and CAD activities.
Recent VLSI projects in LIS have included: a spline generation chip for 3D curve manipulation, a single chip for real-time lossless data compression, a multiprocessor routing chip that employs randomness to avoid deadlock and livelock, a new field-programmable gate array architecture, and self-tuned systems that adjust their clock speed automatically for maximum performance.
Recent embedded systems projects have included: infrared beacons for obtaining location information in a mobile computing environment, new types of task-specific personal digital assistants, various "cards" for palm-top devices, and mobile robots.
In CAD software, projects span the entire spectrum of tools - from specification and design aids to simulation and optimization tools and IC layout generators. Most recently, work has focused on synthesis of high performance circuits and embedded systems. Current projects include tools for timing analysis, software synthesis, placement and routing, asynchronous design, and sequential logic synthesis.
LIS is also used to leverage both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in hardware design. The laboratory's tools and facilities are used to support CSE567 and the laboratory provides workstations with tools and design environments for student use. Over the last few years, CSE567 students have designed transistor level circuits to play Tetris and Checkers exploiting the fine grain parallel computation available in hardware and designed FPGA-based local area network controllers. CSE477 is the primary undergraduate course that benefits from LIS in the form of hardware testers that can be used to interface prototype hardware to interactive schematic editors and simulators. A new undergraduate VLSI design course has been introduced and will be supported primarily by the LIS facilities.
LIS is housed in 424 Sieg Hall. Computing support consists of a collection of color SUN SparcStations and X terminals clustered around large capacity file servers. The laboratory also includes a chip and board test facility. Field programmable gate arrays can be designed and tested in the laboratory. VLSI chips are fabricated through the MOSIS facility through DARPA and NSF contracts. A modern hardware design environment is maintained through the use of in-house, university, and industry computer-aided design tools.
Funding for LIS is provided by DARPA, NSF, and local and national industry.
Principal Investigators: Borriello, Burns, Ebeling, Kehl, Snyder