Professor James Stine Awarded $1.5M Grant from the Air Force and Department of Defense
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Computer engineering professor and Earl and Carolyn Glimp Professor of Engineering, James Stine, has been awarded the first phase of a three year, $1,504,372 research grant from the United States Air Force to design low-energy, high performance, application-specific computer architecture for 14nm and 7nm CMOS.
The award is part of the Air Force’s Future Autonomous Battlespace RF w/Integrated Communications (FABRIC) Project, which is a transformative communication program appropriate for Access/Area Denial environments. The overall goal is to provide combat-ready, cyber-hardened, power efficient, embedded computer architectures.
“We are grateful for the support from the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Department of Defense,” said Stine. “This grant will enable my laboratory to advance computer architecture and VLSI design, as well as help us explore areas in low-power strategies for application-specific implementations. I also believe that this opportunity will continue the tradition of excellence that Oklahoma State University exudes.”
The scope of this award is targeted at the implementation of signal-processing and multi-core architectures that exhibit low power at 14nm and 7nm feature sizes. Nowadays, applications, especially real-time systems, require more computation power to process more data in one unit of time. While the need for heavy computation exists, the demand for computer architectures that consume smaller amounts of energy is also paramount. This is complicated by the fact that energy and power performance is related to the number of devices on a chip and its respective application. Consequently, the dichotomy of adding more devices, yet maintaining lower energy footprints are complicated by the fact that both are inversely proportional to each other. Therefore, low power and high-performance are always among the top priorities in designing almost all Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) systems. This project aims to target this problem and achieve solutions that have been previously unsolvable using pre-existing techniques.
“This award substantiates the talent and expertise of Dr. Stine’s research group and his national leadership in computer architecture technologies,” said Jeffrey Young, head of the school of electrical and computer engineering. “Not only does the Air Force receive bleeding edge technology from OSU, the students of OSU are receiving a first-class education by working on key components of the project.”