Ph.inisheD.

Well, I FINALLY finished my PhD.

For those who are exceedingly bored, my dissrtation is online (The SFRA: A Fixed-Frequency FPGA Architecture) at

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Nicholas C. Weaver                                 nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
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Nicholas C. Weaver
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Congrats... I am sure it was a lot of work. :)

Since you are in that lofty group and must have a much better view than the rest of us, are you aware of much research in FPGAs about partial/modular configuration?

Just curious.

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Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
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rickman

Quick coredump from memory.

There was a lot of stuff on the old 6200 a few years back, because it was relatively friendly for it. Satnam had some stuff, among others.

Also there was the many-years-back time-multiplexed 4K Xilinx research project, which virtualized circuits with fine-grained multiplexing (project never went anywhere because of the power consumption of context switching every cycle).

There's some on programming model to allow virtualization (eg, SCORE here at berkeley), these target abstract FPGAs, not current silicon.

There's a lot of interest today internally in Xilinx and elsewhere on the possibility, but not sure HOW much research is going on, and in many ways limited by both the silicon (can only reconfigure column-at-a-time, a feature largely for testing not user design) and the tools (how do you swap out bits? Represent the swapping? Etc?).

I think if there is some conceptual breakthrough on how to treat the silicon, the other stuff will probably fall into place, as the detailed routing (eg, insuring modules don't interfear etc) could be faked up with Jbits (do a ripup and reroute, and run things 10% slower to give a margin for simplicity), and "make this change and now these things run a lot faster" on the silicon could happen in later egnerations.

But I think its largely awaiting the conceptual breakthrough. How do you treat this blob which is different things at different points in time?

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Nicholas C. Weaver                                 nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
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Nicholas C. Weaver

Congratulations! Sounds like you didn't have the luxary to concentrate solely on your PhD. You had to juggle a job and perhaps a family also?

How was your dissertation defense? What was the topic?

Congrats again, I'm sure you're glad to have it done with. Now you get to bust your butt getting tenure, if that's your route ;_)

--Vinh

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Vinh Pham

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--Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.

401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email snipped-for-privacy@andraka.com
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"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759

Reply to
Ray Andraka

Nope. Just had to juggle with interesting distractions like Internet Worms and the like. :)

Berkeley believes "The best defense is a good offense", I did my thesis offense (qualifying exam) about 2 years ago.

Tell me about it! Worse, Darpa is NOT funding security work, at least unclassified security work.

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Nicholas C. Weaver                                 nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Reply to
Nicholas C. Weaver

I expect that banks, brokers and amazon.com are.

-- Mike Treseler

Reply to
Mike Treseler

Congrats -- read the TOC, final conclusion and bibliography . Job well done!

JoeG

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JoeG

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