SystemX

The realization of quantum computers will provide a new and unprecedented computing resource that could significantly impact many industries ranging from medicine to artificial intelligence. Recently, the field of quantum computing has been transitioning from experimental demonstrations of quantum bits (qubits) to engineering larger scale quantum systems with the aid of industry. Electron spin qubits in silicon are an excellent candidate for this purpose as they can be made using transistor-like structures that are CMOS compatible, opening up the possibility to leverage off the semiconducting industry [1].

In this talk I will discuss the state-of-the-art in the silicon spin qubit field focusing on my recent work at TUDelft where we demonstrated a programmable two-qubit quantum processor that could perform the Deutsch-Josza and Grover search algorithm [2]. Moving to larger scale qubit systems will require the ability to make reproducible qubit arrays which is incredibly challenging for university clean rooms due limited process control and slow turn around. I will discuss how these issues are being addressed at Intel through the use of their industrial 300mm fabrication line and expertise in high volume electrical tests.

[1] F. A. Zwanenburg et al. Silicon quantum electronics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 85, 961 (2013)

[2] T. F. Watson et al. A programmable two-qubit processor in silicon, Nature 555, 633-637 (2018)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is redefining how we interact with the world by supplying a global view based not only on human-provided data but also human-device connected data. For example, in Health Care, IoT will bring decreased costs, improved treatment results, and better disease management. However, the connectivity-in-everything model brings heightened security concerns. Additionally, the projected growth of connected nodes not only increases security concerns, it also leads to a 1000-fold increase in wireless data traffic in the near future. This data storm results in a spectrum scarcity thereby driving the urgent need for shared spectrum access technologies. These security deficiencies and the wireless spectrum crunch require innovative system-level secure and scalable solutions.

This talk will introduce energy-efficient and application-driven system-level solutions for secure and spectrum-aware wireless communications. I will present an ultra-fast bit-level frequency-hopping scheme for physical-layer security. This scheme utilizes the frequency agility of devices in combination with time-interleaved radio frequency architectures and protocols to achieve secure wireless communications. To address the wireless spectrum crunch, future smart radio systems will evaluate the spectrum usage dynamically and opportunistically use the underutilized spectrum; this will require spectrum sensing for interferer avoidance. I will discuss a system-level approach using band-pass sparse signal processing for rapid interferer detection in a wideband spectrum to convert the abstract improvements promised by sparse signal processing theory, e.g., fewer measurements, to concrete improvements in time and energy efficiency. Beyond these system-level solutions, I will also discuss future research directions including secure package-less THz tags and ingestible micro-bio-electronic devices.

In the near future, swarms of millimeter scale robots will be vital and common tools in industrial, commercial, and personal settings. With applications ranging from distributed chemical sensing to tangible 3D interfaces, providing mobility platforms to low-power sensing and actuation nodes will push us that much closer to the dream of ubiquitous computing. In this talk I will present my efforts to develop a flying microrobot, the "ionocraft", which uses atmospheric ion thrusters to move completely silently and with no mechanical moving parts. Spanning from development of novel MEMS actuators to incorporation of onboard sensor packages for control, I will discuss system design at the resource-constrained edge of robotics. Even given a working mobility platform, a bevy of interdisciplinary challenges remain to make microrobots useful tools; I will further discuss strategies for enabling future autonomous swarm deployments as well as for studying human-robot interaction outside the context of traditional social robotics.

Photonic integrated circuits have seen a dramatic increase in complexity over the past decades, driven by recent applications in datacenter communications and enabled by the availability of standardized mature technology offerings. Among several directions that are currently pursued to enhance functionality and to reduce power consumption in photonic integrated circuits, we exploit in our research mechanical movement of wave-guiding structures at the micro- and nanoscale, motivated by the unique opportunities of access to a strong modulation of the effective index and the possibility to include mechanical latching and thus non-volatile states. In this talk, we will show how we can exploit nano-mechanics in photonic integrated circuits to perform basic operations on-chip, such as phase shifting, attenuation or photonic switching. Due to their small footprint and low insertion loss, such components can be integrated to form large arrays of several thousands of unit cells with outstanding system performance. We will discuss how movable waveguides can be fabricated in dedicated surface micromachining technology or by selective post-processing in a standard silicon photonics platform. We will discuss an experimental demonstrator of a mechanical waveguide latching mechanism, and provide an outlook on the implementation of the concept of large-scale reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits using Silicon Photonic MEMS. 

UPDATED TOPIC AND SPEAKER: We used atomic layer deposition (ALD) and microfabrication techniques to make robust plates out of a single continuous ALD layer with cm-scale lateral dimensions and thicknesses between 25 and 100 nm, creating the thinnest freestanding plates that can be picked up by hand. We also fabricated and characterized nanocardboard – plate metamaterials made from multiple layers of nanoscale thickness, whose geometry and properties are reminiscent of honeycomb sandwich plates or corrugated paper cardboard. Ultralow weight, mechanical robustness, thermal insulation, as well as chemical and thermal stability of alumina make plate metamaterials attractive for numerous applications, including structural elements in flying microrobots and interstellar light sails, high-temperature thermal insulation in energy converters, photophoretic levitation, as well as ultrathin sensors and resonators. I will briefly discuss our experimental progress on all these applications, including demonstrations of extremely robust thermal insulators that can sustain a temperature drop of ~1000 K across a micron-scale gap, macroscopic plates that levitate when illuminated by light, and hollow AFM cantilevers that offer greatly enhanced sensitivity and data acquisition rates.

Topic:
Fine-Grain Many-Core Processor Arrays for Efficient and High-Performance Computation
Thursday, January 17, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Venue:
Bldg. 380 Rm. 380X
Speaker:
Prof. Bevan Baas - Electrical and Computer Engineering - UC Davis
Abstract / Description:
The continually-growing number of devices available per chip assures the presence of many processing blocks per die communicating by some type of inter-processor interconnect. It is interesting to consider what the granularity of the processing blocks should be given a fixed amount of die area. The smallest reasonable tile size is on the order of an FPGA's LUT. Between the domains of FPGAs and traditional processors lies a lightly-explored region which we call fine-grain many-core, whose processors: can be programmed by simple traditional programs; typically operate with high throughput and high energy-efficiency; are well suited for deep submicron fabrication technologies; and are well matched to many DSP, multimedia, and embedded workloads, and--somewhat counterintuitively--also to some enterprise and scientific kernels.

The AsAP project has developed fine-grain many-core systems composed of large numbers of programmable reduced-complexity processors with no algorithm-specific hardware and with individual per-processor digitally-tunable clock oscillators operating completely independently with respect to each other (GALS). Due to the independence of the MIMD cores and individual near-optimal oscillator halting, the system operates with a power dissipation that is almost ideally proportional to the system load.

A third generation 32 nm design that integrates 1000 independent programmable processors and 12 memory modules has been designed and fabricated. The processors and memory modules communicate through a reconfigurable full-rate circuit-switched mesh network and a complementary very small area packet router, and they operate to an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz, which is believed to be the highest clock frequency achieved by a fabricated processor designed in a university. At a supply voltage of 0.9 V, processors operating at an average of 1.24 GHz dissipate 17 mW while issuing one instruction per cycle. At 0.56 V, processors operating at 115 MHz dissipate 0.61 mW resulting in 5.3 pJ/instruction, enabling 1000 100%-active cores to be powered by a single AA battery.

Several dozen DSP and general tasks have been coded plus more complex applications including: AES encryption engines, a full-rate H.264 1080p 30fps HDTV residual encoder, a fully-compliant IEEE 802.11a/11g Wi-Fi wireless LAN baseband transmitter and receiver, a SAR radar engine, a complete first-pass H.264 encoder, convolutional neural networks, large sparse matrix operations, sorting and processing of enterprise data, and others. Power, throughput, and die area results generally compare very well with solutions on existing programmable processors. A C++ compiler and automatic mapping tool greatly simplify programming.

Statistical mechanics is founded on the assumption that a system can reach thermal equilibrium, regardless of the starting state. Interactions between particles facilitate thermalization, but, can interacting systems always equilibrate regardless of parameter values\,? The energy spectrum of a system can answer this question and reveal the nature of the underlying phases. However, most experimental techniques only indirectly probe the many-body energy spectrum. Using a chain of nine superconducting qubits, we implement a novel technique for directly resolving the energy levels of interacting photons. We benchmark this method by capturing the intricate energy spectrum predicted for 2D electrons in a magnetic field, the Hofstadter butterfly. By increasing disorder, the spatial extent of energy eigenstates at the edge of the energy band shrink, suggesting the formation of a mobility edge. At strong disorder, the energy levels cease to repel one another and their statistics approaches a Poisson distribution - the hallmark of transition from the thermalized to the many-body localized phase. Our work introduces a new many-body spectroscopy technique to study quantum phases of matter.

The widespread adoption of smartphones and wearables offers an unprecedented opportunity for low cost health studies of far-ranging reach. Within 6 months of the launch of Apple’s ResearchKit, more than 100,000 people from all over the United States were recruited into five launch mobile application-based research studies.  Similar libraries have since sprung up on Android.  This talk will provide an introduction to mobile health studies on smartphones including study design, regulatory approvals, production, recruitment, maintenance and scientific discovery.  I will highlight ways in which smartphones have been coopted as data collection tools able to amass a wealth of survey, device, sensor and clinical data and the challenges that stand before completing a successful study.

In this presentation, I would like to discuss with you how to establish a sustainable and smart society through the internet of energy for connecting at any time and any place. I suspect that you have heard the phrase, "Internet of Energy" less often. The meaning of this phrase is simple. Because of a ubiquitous energy transmission system, you do not need to worry about a shortage of electric power. One of the most important items for establishing a sustainable society is [...]

"Inaugural Linvill Distinguished Seminar on Electronic Systems Technology," EE News, July 2018

In this talk I will present planning and decision-making techniques for safely and efficiently maneuvering autonomous aerospace vehicles during proximity operations, manipulation tasks, and surface locomotion. I will first address the "spacecraft motion planning problem," by discussing its unique aspects and presenting recent results on planning under uncertainty via Monte Carlo sampling. I will then turn the discussion to higher-level decision making; in particular, I will discuss an axiomatic theory of risk and how one can leverage such a theory for a principled and tractable inclusion of risk-awareness in robotic decision making, in the context of Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning. Throughout the talk, I will highlight a variety of space-robotic applications my research group is contributing to (including the Mars 2020 and Hedgehog rovers, and the Astrobee free-flying robot), as well as applications to the automotive and UAV domains.

This work is in collaboration with NASA JPL, NASA Ames, NASA Goddard, and MIT.