Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse Funds Four College of Engineering Projects

University Park, PA (Jan. 21, 2000)–The Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse is committing more than half a million dollars through its Electronic Design Technology Development Program to fund four projects in the Penn State College of Engineering. The projects include "Indoor Wireless Communications Using Infrared Light," which resides within the College's Department of Electrical Engineering.  Also, projects "Architecture and Compiler Power Issues in System on a Chip," "MediaWorm: A Single Chip Router Architecture with Quality of Service Support," and "Simulation of Physics on a Real-Time Architecture (SPARTA)" which all reside within the College's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Digital Greenhouse's Electronic Design Technology Development Program provides development funds, expertise, and project management to facilitate breakthroughs in advanced chip design for electronic products. These funded projects are the first steps in developing "smart products," which include those devices for home automation, handheld devices for wireless communication systems, digital television and set-top boxes that can enable the delivery of enhanced communication services, and a variety of digital network applications. "Indoor Wireless Communications Using Infrared Light" is being conducted by Mohsen Kavehrad, professor of electrical engineering. The need for high-speed portable multimedia workstations, laptops, and PDAs is expected to accelerate the use of broadband indoor wireless access. The thrust of this project is to develop a novel transceiver optical antenna system using infrared light that would enable easy, high bandwidth connectivity within homes and offices. "Architecture and Compiler Power Issues in System on a Chip" is being conducted by Mary Jane Irwin, professor of computer science and engineering; Mahmut Kandemir, associate professor of computer science and engineering; and Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, assistant professor of computer science and engineering. As more and more fuctionality is integrated into smaller and smaller chips, power consumption and dissipation become major system design issues. The $226,000 project will provide a software system to characterize and model the power of major components of a System on a Chip (SoC) design and allow the design to be optimized for the lowest possible power consumption. "MediaWorm: A Single Chip Router Architecture with Quality of Service Support" is being conducted by Chita Das, professor of computer science and engineering, Irwin, and Narayanan. With the increasing use of computer clusters in a diverse set of work environments, it has become essential to design high performance network interconnects with high level quality of service (QoS) guarantees. The $298,000 research project will concentrate on the design, fabrication, and testing of a new high performance switched network router, called MediaWorm, which can provide the required level of quality. "Simulation of Physics on a Real-Time Architecture (SPARTA)" is being conducted by Irwin and graduate student Benjamin Bishop. One of the key technologies in human-computer interaction is physical modeling to create realistic virtual worlds, such as the Pod Racer scene in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, with which a person can easily interact. At present, such modeling is relatively slow. The main goal of the $50,000 SPARTA project is to develop extremely fast physical modeling through the use of specialized chip hardware in order to better interact with these virtual worlds in real-time. The Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse is a non-profit organization funded in part by Pennsylvania and a consortium of member firms including Sony, Oki Electric Industry, and Cadence Design Systems, along with the participation of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. * * * Editors: More information on the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse can be found on the World Wide Web at www.digitalgreenhouse.com. Contact: Curtis Chan Phone: (814) 865-5544 E-mail: cchan@engr.psu.edu