My last blog about my talk at HDT 2019 on Stacking Asynchronous Circuits contained a link to my slides. I recommend you having a particular look at slide #21. It talks about an interesting fact that a series (stack) discharge rate follows the law of the inverse Pythagorean!
It looks like mother nature caters for a geometric law of the most economic common between two individual sides.
I just attended a Second Workshop on Hardware Design Theory, held in Budapest, collocated with 33rd International Symposium on Distributed Computing http://www.disc-conference.org/wp/disc2019/
The HDT’19 workshop was organised by Moti Medina and Andrey Mokhov. It had a number of invited talks, and here is the programme: https://sites.google.com/view/motimedina/hdt-2019
I gave a talk on Stacked Asynchronous circuits.
Here is the abstract: In this talk we will look at digital circuits from the viewpoint of electrical circuit theory, i.e. as loads to power sources. Such circuits, especially when they are asynchronous can be seen as voltage controlled oscillators. Their switching behaviour, including their operating frequency is modulated by the supply voltage. Interestingly, in the reverse direction if they are driven by external event sources, their switching frequency determines their inherent impedance which itself makes them ideal potentiometers or voltage dividers. Such circuits can be stacked like non-linear resistors in series and parallel, and lend themselves to interesting theoretical and practical results, such as RC circuits with hyperbolic capacitor discharges and designs of dynamic frequency mirrors.
Here is the PDF of my slides: https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/alex.yakovlev/home.formal/stacked-async-budapest-2019.171019.pdf
A very nice new book “Carl Adam Petri: Ideas, Personality, Impact“, edited by Wolfgang Reisig and Grzegorz Rozenberg, has just been published by Springer:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-96154-5
Newcastle professors, Brian Randell, Maciej Koutny and myself contributed articles for it.
An important aspect of those and other authors’ articles is that they mostly talk about WHY certain models and methods related to Petri nets have been investigated rather than describing the formalisms themselves. Basically, some 30-40 years of history are laid out on 4-5 pages of text and pictures.
My paper “Living Lattices” provides a personal view of how Petri’s research inspired my own research, including comments on related topics such as lattices, Muller diagrams, complexity, concurrency, and persistence.
The chapter can be downloaded from here:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96154-5_28
There is also an interesting chapter by Jordi Cortadella “From Nets to Circuits and from Circuits to Nets”, which reviews the impact of Petri nets in one of the domains in which they have played a predominant role: asynchronous circuits. Jordi also discusses challenges and topics of interest for the future. This chapter can be downloaded from here:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96154-5_27
I envisage a ‘mothball computer’ – a capsule with the case whose outer surface harvests power from the environment and inside the capsule we have the computational electronics.
High-speed clocking can be provided by EM of highest possible frequency – e.g. by visible light, X-rays or ultimately by gamma rays!
Power supply for modulation electronics can be generated by solar cells – Perovskite cells. Because Perovskite cell have lead in them they can insulate gamma rays from propagation outside the compute capsule.
Information will be in the form of time-modulated super-HF signals.
We will represent information in terms of time-averaged pulse bursts.
We will have a ‘continuum’ range of temporal compute which will operate in the range between deterministic one-shot pulse burst (discrete) through deterministic multi-pulse analog averaged signal to stochastic multi-pulse averaged signal (cf. book by Mars & Poppelbaum – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stochastic-Deterministic-Averaging-Processes-electronics/dp/0906048443)
Temporal Computing (https://temporalcomputing.com) is the right kind of business opportunity for this Odyssey!
We can define computations as processes of working of electrical circuits which are associated with sequences of (meaningful) events. Let’s take these events as discrete, i.e. something that can be enumerated with integer indices.
We can then map sequences of events onto integer numbers, or indices. Events can be associated with the facts of the system reaching certain states. Or, in a more distributed view, individual variables of the system, reaching certain states or levels. Another view is that a component in the system’s model moving from one state to another.
To mark such events and enable them we need sensory or actuating properties in the system. Why not simply consider an element called “switch”:
Switch = {ON if CTRL= ACTIVE, OFF if CTRL = PASSIVE}
What we want to achieve is to be able to express the evolution of physical variables as functions of event indices.
Examples of such computing processes are:
The goal of modelling is to find a way of solving the behaviour of computational electrical circuits using “switching calculus” (similar to Heaviside’s “operational calculus” used to solev differential equations in an efficient way).
L. Ya. Rosenblum and A.V. Yakovlev.
Signal graphs: from self-timed to timed ones,
Proc. of the Int. Workshop on Timed Petri Nets,
Torino, Italy, July 1985, IEEE Computer Society Press, NY, 1985, pp. 199-207.
https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/alex.yakovlev/home.formal/LR-AY-TPN85.pdf
A paper establishing interesting relationship between the interleaving and true causality semantics
using algebraic lattices. It also identifies an connection between the classes of lattices and the property
of generalisability of concurrency relations (from arity N to arity N+1),
i.e. the conditions for answering the question such as,
if three actions A, B and C are all pairwise concurrent, i.e. ||(A,B), ||(A,C), and ||(B,C), are they concurrent “in three”, i.e. ||(A,B,C)?
L. Rosenblum, A. Yakovlev, and V. Yakovlev.
A look at concurrency semantics through “lattice glasses”.
In Bulletin of the EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science), volume 37, pages 175-180, 1989.
https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/alex.yakovlev/home.formal/lattices-Bul-EATCS-37-Feb-1989.pdf
Paper about the so called symbolic STGs, in which signals can have multiple values (which is often convenient for specifications of control at a more abstract level than dealing with binary signals) and hence in order to implement them in logic gates one needs to solve the problem of binary expansion or encoding, as well as resolve all the state coding issues on the way of synthesis of circuit implementation.
Paper about analysing concurrency semantics using relation-based approach. Similar techniques are now being developed in the domain of business process modelling and work-flow analysis: L.Ya. Rosenblum and A.V. Yakovlev. Analysing semantics of concurrent hardware specifications. Proc. Int. Conf. on Parallel Processing (ICPP89), Pennstate University Press, University Park, PA, July 1989, pp. 211-218, Vol.3
https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/alex.yakovlev/home.formal/LR-AY-ICPP89.pdf
Моделирование параллельных процессов. Сети Петри [Текст] : курс для системных архитекторов, программистов, системных аналитиков, проектировщиков сложных систем управления / Мараховский В. Б., Розенблюм Л. Я., Яковлев А. В. – Санкт-Петербург : Профессиональная литература, 2014. – 398 с. : ил., табл.; 24 см. – (Серия “Избранное Computer Science”).; ISBN 978-5-9905552-0-4
(Серия “Избранное Computer Science”)
https://www.researchgate.net/…/Simulation-of-Concurrent-Processes-Petri-Nets.pdf
Today In Miami at the age of 83 passed away a well known Russian and American automata theory scientist Leonid Rosenblum. He was my mentor and closest friend. Here is some brief information about his career. In Russian.
Леонид Яковлевич Розенблюм (5 марта 1936 г. – 2 апреля 2019 г.), канд. техн.наук, доцент – пионер мажоритарной логики, самосинхронной схемотехники, теории и применений сетей Петри в моделировании и проектировании цифровых схем и параллельных систем.В течение 20 лет, с 1960г. по 1980г., занимался с коллегами (в группе профессора В.И. Варшавского) наукой и приложениями (например, разработкой новой схемотехники и надежных бортовых компьютеров) в Вычислительном центре Ленинградского отделения Математического института им. В.А. Стеклова АН СССР.
С 1981г. по 1989 г. работал доцентом кафедры математического обеспечения и применения ЭВМ в ЛЭТИ им. В.И. Ульянова-Ленина (ныне Санкт-Петербургский государственный электротехнический университет). В 90-х годах после эмиграции в США работал адъюнкт-профессором в Бостонском университете, а также исследователем в Гарвардском университете.
Соавтор/автор пяти книг, около двух сотен различных изданий, учебных пособий, статей и обзоров, более 40 авторских свидетельств на изобретения.
Среди его учеников – профессора университетов России, Великобритании, США, Финляндии и других стран, сотрудники институтов АН Российской Федерации, таких как Институт Проблем Управления, а также известных отечественных и зарубежных компаний, таких как Intel, Cadence, Xilinx и т.д.
Леонида Яковлевича отличало врожденное свойство видеть в людях только положительные качества, помогать всем и во всем, и конечно необыкновенное чувство юмора. Эта утрата для огромного числа людей повсюду, всех кому посчастливилось его знать или слышать о нем.
Вечная память, дорогой Лека!
Leonid Yakovlevich Rosenblum (March 5, 1936 – April 2, 2019), Cand. Technical Sciences, Associate Professor – a pioneer of majority logic, self-timed circuit design, theory and applications of Petri nets in the modeling and design of digital circuits and parallel systems.
Among his students are professors from universities in Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Finland and other countries, employees of institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation, such as the Institute of Management Problems, as well as well-known domestic and foreign companies such as Intel, Cadence, Xilinx, etc.
I was invited to give a talk on my Research at the Royal Academy of Engineering event, held in Newcastle on the 28th January 2019.
The title of the talk is “Asynchronous Design Research or Building Little Clockless Universes”
The PDF of the slides of my talk are here: http://async.org.uk/presentations/AlexYakovlev-Research-RAEngEvent-280119.pdf
I only had 15 minutes give to me. Not a lot to talk about the 40 years of research life. So, at some point in preparing for this talk, I decided that I’ll try to explain what the research in microelectronic systems design is about, and in particular how my research in asynchronous design helps it.
Basically, I tried to emphasize on the role of ‘time control’ in designing ‘little universes’, where the time span covered by our knowledge of what’s is going on in those systems and why is between 1 few picoseconds (transistor switching event) and hours if not days (applications life times). So we cover around 10^18 events. How does it compare to the life of universe – being “only” around 10^13 years. Are we as powerful as gods in creating our ‘little universes’.
So, in my research I want to better control TIME at the smallest possible scale, surprisingly but, by going CLOCK-LESS! Clocking creates an illusory notion of determinacy in tracking events and their causal-relationship. Actually, it obscures such information. Instead by doing your circuit design in a disciplined way, such as speed-independent circuit design, you can control timing of events down to the best levels of granularity. In my research I achieved that level of granularity for TIME. It took me some 40 years!
But, furthermore, more recently, say in the last 10 years, I have managed to learn pretty well how to manage power and energy also to that smallest possible level, and actually make sure that energy consumption is known to the level of events controlled in a causal way. Energy/power-modulated computing, and its particular form of power-proportional computing, is the way for that. We can really keep track of where energy goes down to the level of a few femto-Joules. Indeed if a parasitic capacitance of an inverter output in modern CMOS technology is around 10fF and we switch it at Vdd=1V, we are talking about minimum energy quantity of CV^2=10fJ= 10^-14J per charging/discharging cycle (0-1-0 in terms of logic levels). Mobile phones run applications that can consume energy at the level of 10^4J. Again, like with time we seem to be pretty well informed about what’s going on in terms of energy covering 10^18 events! Probably, I’ll just need another 5 or so years to conquer determinacy in energy and power terms – our work on Real-Power Computing is in this direction.
Now, what’s next, you might ask? what other granularification, distribution and decentralization can we conquer in terms of building little universes!? The immediate guess that comes to my mind is the distribution (in time and energy directions) of functionality, and to be more precise intelligence. Can we create the granules of intelligence at the smallest possible scale, and cover same orders of magnitude. It is a hard task. Certainly, for CMOS technology it would be really difficult to imagine that we can force something like a small collection of transistors dynamically learn and optimize its functionality. But there are ways of going pretty close to that. One of them seems to be the direction of learning automata. Read about Tsetlin automata, for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetlin_machine) , in the recent work of Ole-Christoffer Granmo.
Run smarter – Live longer!
Breathe smarter – Live longer!
Tick smarter – Live longer!
I could continue listing these slogans for designing better electronics for the era of trillions of devices and peta, exa and zetta bits of information produced on our small planet.
Ultimately it is about how good we are in TIMING our ingestion and processing of information. TIMING has been and will always be a key design factor which will determine other factors such as performance, accuracy, energy efficiency of the system and even productivity of design processes.
As computing spreads into periphery, i.e. it goes into ordinary objects and fills the forms of these objects like water fills the shape of the cup, it would be only natural to think that computing at the peri or edge should be more determined by the nature of the environment rather than rules of computer design dominated the by-going era of compute-centrism. Computing for ages has been quite selfish and tyranic. Its agenda has been set by scaling the size of semiconductor devices and growing complexity of digital part. This scaling process had two important features. One was increasing speed, power consumption which has led to an ongoing growth in data server capacity. The other feature was the only way to manage complexity of the digital circuitry was to use clock in design to avoid potential racing conditions in circuits. As computing reaches the peri it does not need to become as complex and clocky as those compute-centric digital mosters. Computing has to be much more environment friendly. It has to be amenable to the conditions and needs of the environment – otherwise it simply won’t survive!
But the TIMING factor will remain! What will then drive this factor? It won’t certainly only be the scaling of devices and drive for higher throughput by means of clock – why? for example, because we will not be able to provide enough power for that high throughput – there isn’t enough lithium on the planet to make so many batteries. Nor we have enough engineers or technicians to maintain replacing those batteries. But on other hand we don’t need clock to run the digital parts of those peri devices because they will not be that complex. So, where will TIMING come from? One of natural ways of timing these devices is to extract TIMING directly from the environment, and to be precise from the ENERGY flows in the environment.
We have always used a power supply wire in our electronic circuits. Yes, but we have always used it as an always-ON servant, who had to be there to give us 5 Volts or 3 Volts, or more recently 1 Volt or even less (the so-called sub-threshold operation) like 0.4 Volts. That wire or signal has never been much of a signal carrying information value. Why? Well because such information value was always in other signals which would give us either data bits or clock ticks. Today is time to reconsider this traditional thinking and widen our horizon by looking at the power supply signal as a useful information source. Asynchronous or self-timed circuits are fundamentally much more cognizant of the energy flow. Such circuits naturally tune their tick boxes to the power levels and run/breath/tick smarter!
At Newcastle we have been placing asynchronous circuits at the edge with the environment into analog electronics. In particular, it has been power regulation circuits, A-to-D converters and various sensors (voltage, capacitance, …). This way allows significantly reduce the latencies and response times to important events in the analog, reduce sizes of passives (caps and inductors), but perhaps most importantly, thanks to our asynchronous design tools under Workcraft (http://workcraft.org) we have made asynchronous design much more productive. Industrial engineers in the analog domain are falling in love with our tools.
More information can be found here:
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/engineering/research/eee/microsystems/
Mathematics is a (or, probably, the only!) language that enables ideas about physics be communicated between people across different generations and across different cultures.
Inevitably, it ”suffers” from approximation and abstraction compared to physical reality. A bit like an impressionist painting reflects the real picture.
The question is what and how much is sacrificed here.
One test of whether the sacrifice is acceptable or not is in the way how people, while using mathematics, can build physical objects such as airplanes, cars, bridges, radios, computers etc. If they can and at a reasonable cost, then the language is adequate to the purpose.
For example, it seems that the mathematical language of Heaviside’s operational calculus is sufficient for the purposes of designing and analysing electrical circuits of good quality and in an acceptable time.
Another example, the language of Boolean algebra is sufficient to design logic circuits if we clock them safely so that they don’t produce any hazards. If, however we don’t clock them safely, we need other ways to describe causal relationships between events, such as Signal Transition Graphs.