I-Corps: Timing-Aware Computing Infrastructure

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide computation infrastructure for building and scaling the Internet of Things (IoT) efficiently and quickly. The situation is similar to what happened with personal computer and mobile devices. These applications required specialized computation infrastructure to be provided before they could be mass produced and commercialized. Infrastructure vendors in the mentioned application spaces are large companies with enormous contributions to the economy and fundamental research in their respective fields. This project aims to follow in their footsteps in the emerging IoT markets with potential applications in self-driving cars, autonomous drones, advanced robotics, smart/green consumer electronics and medical devices. This will enable companies in these fields to focus their engineering efforts on their primary products and services without spending time on costly and long iterations to develop underlying infrastructure like high-performance control and communication systems. This I-Corps project will explore the possibility for the fundamental change in how engineering teams approach the design of high-performance control and communication systems in industry and academia. The project is based on a new design methodology, supporting infrastructure, e.g. new hardware and software architectures, and a set of design tools connecting them together into a coherent design ecosystem. Unlike the traditional approaches to computer-aided design, this approach does not base its tools on automation but rather on transparency. Automation is the standard objective to building design tools, but it often is not sufficient. When a particular tool fails users are often left with no information to understand why and how to improve the situation, resulting in costly and long trial-and-error search for a solution. Focusing on transparency this approach can deliver tools which keep the user informed and aware of design tradeoffs, hence helping them to make informed decisions. This approach to design is the outcome of our previous research in hardware-software co-design and attempts to improve design efficiency.