Background

  In order to use IT systems safely over a long period of time, the technologies for fault tolerance, recycling, security, energy-saving and cost reduction became important.  For constructing such IT systems, synthetic approach using the relevant technologies of semiconductor, logic circuit, computer architecture, software and system design is needed.  To research such issues, the Technical committee on Sustainable Computing (SUSC) is organized in the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE).

Objectives

  We especially pay attention to the reconfigurable hardware such as FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).  And we aim to make the design environment which can realize efficient application processing on such hardware.

Our methods

  Although many design environments for the reconfigurable hardware are already proposed, the highly efficient circuits which the skillful hardware designers can realize are not automatically synthesized from high-level design descriptions.  Then, we make it possible by using the behavioral description language which can describe required hardware resources explicitly.  And the design environment which we propose will expand the use of reconfigurable hardware.

Expected effects

  By configuring suitable circuits for the application on reconfigurable hardware, drastic reduction of energy consumption can be realized compared with the conventional CPU processing.  Moreover, since renewal of circuit functions can be performed on the same hardware, recycle and reuse of IT devices will be promoted.  That is, this technology can contribute to the energy saving and the cost reduction for the whole life cycle of IT systems, and is useful for realizing the gentle IT society for the earth environment.

 

URL

http://www.arc.cs.okayama-u.ac.jp/
https://sites.google.com/site/renewableintegratedsystems/