Northwest Laboratory
for Integrated Systems

LIS:
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington, Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA



The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington has been engaged in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) research, development, and education since the late 1970s. Today, the Northwest Laboratory for Integrated Systems is the focus of a wide variety of VLSI architectures, embedded sytems, and CAD research.
[CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS] [PREVIOUS RESEARCH PROJECTS] [PAPER REPOSITORY] [RESEARCHERS]

Current Research Projects

Embedded Systems

o The Chinook Project: A Hardware/Software Co-design, Co-synthesis, and Co-simulation system for embedded applications.

Performance Optimization of Synchronous Circuits

o Retiming Level-Clocked Circuits: Efficient algorithms for retiming circuits that use level-sensitive latches to improve performance, reduce cost, and increase tolerance to clock skew.

o Architectural Retiming: Methods for improving the performance of synchronous circuits that have latency or feedback contraints.

Network Router

The Chaotic Routing Project

Reconfigurable Computing

o RaPiD:Reconfigurable Pipelined Datapath: RaPiD is a coarse-grained high-performance FPGA architecture that allows deeply pipelined computational datapaths to be constructed dynamically from a mix of functional units.

Previous Research Projects

o Gemini: Validating layout by comparing the specification circuit to the implemented circuit.
o MacTester: A low-cost digital functional tester for chips and circuits with TTL or CMOS voltage levels.
o Time Separation of Events: Specification, synthesis, and verification of timed asynchronous circuits.
o Asynchronous Circuits: Survey of current asynchronous design methodologies, as well as the first FPGA for asynchronous circuits.
o Triptych/Montage FPGA Architectures: Development of the Triptych and Montage FPGA architectures, architectures with improved densities over current commercial FPGAs.
o Multi-FPGA Systems & Rapid-Prototyping: Development of the Springbok Rapid-Prototyping System for Board-Level Designs, as well as partitioning, pin assignment, and routing topology work for general multi-FPGA systems.
o Emerald: An Architecture-Adaptive Toolset for FPGAs

ARPA Reports

ARPA Bluebook Paragraphs

o Overview
o Accomplishments
o Embedded Systems
o High Performance