EECS Seminar: Design Automation of Things for Cross-Layer, Low-Power Battery Operated Systems

Abstract: Traditional low-power design mainly focuses on power consumption of logic components such as microprocessors and memory. In real practices, however, non-logic components/subsystems often dominate the whole system power consumption, which strongly motivates cross-layer power optimization.

This talk introduces cross-layer, low-power design for battery-operated systems but focusing on a various scale of non-digital components/subsystems ranging from portable electronics to electric vehicles. A series of interdisciplinary research examples are demonstrated such as i) low-power LCD systems that pioneered dynamic backlight scaling, ii) passive voltage scaling of energy-aware wireless sensor networks that eliminates the use of a DC-DC converter for supply voltage scaling, iii) battery-fuel cell hybrid power systems that exploit a higher energy density of a fuel cell and a high power density of a battery, iii) hybrid electrical energy storage systems from the architecture to management, which take advantage of different chemistries of batteries and hide their drawbacks, and iv) challenges and opportunities in the design automation of power-efficient electric vehicles from modeling to synthesis.

We demonstrate accurate power modeling, estimation, architectural consideration and design-time/ runtime optimization. This approach enables us to utilize legacy tools and methodologies developed for traditional low-power systems and achieve significant power efficiency enhancement, despite of a large discrepancy in the target applications.

Bio: Naehyuck Chang is a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Before he joined KAIST, he was with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University from 1997 to 2014. Chang also served as a vice dean of College of Engineering, Seoul National University from 2011 to 2013.

Chang is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE for his contributions to low-power systems. He is the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronics Systems (ACM TODAES) and serves(ed) as associated editor of IEEE TVLSI, IEEE TCAD, ACM TECS, IEEE ESL, IEEE TCAS-I, ACM TECS, etc. Chang served for the ACM SIGDA (Special Interest Group on Design Automation) and is currently past chair of ACM SIGDA.. He was TPC co-chair of DAC 2016, ASP-DAC 2015, ICCD 2014, CODES+ISSS 2012, ISLPED 2009, etc., and general co-chair of VLSI-SoC 2015, ICCD 2014, ISLPED 2011, etc.

Chang is the winner of the 2014 ISLPED Best Paper Award, 2011 SAE Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award, 2011 Sinyang Academic Award, 2009 IEEE SSCS  International SoC Design Conference Seoul Chapter Award, and several ISLPED Low-Power Design Contest Awards in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2012 and 2014.