Category Archives: News @ Alex's

Newcastle Electromagnetism Seminar with Ivor Catt and David Walton

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I have just held (on Wed. 9th October 2013) a unique research event at Newcastle, a seminar on Electromagnetism, with Ivor Catt and David Walton speaking about their unconventional electromagnetic theory (based on Oliver Heaviside’s notion of energy current).

What motivated me to organize this seminar:

Why Electromagnetism? It is because there is quite a lot of interesting knowledge in the work of Ivor Catt’s team on TEM that could and should be discussed with academics and young researchers working with one or another side of electromagnetic theory in their specific areas, including Power Electronics and Microsystems.

Why Newcastle? Because there is a close connection between David Walton with Newcastle, facts that Oliver Heaviside sent his Morse pulses from Newcastle, good research community here, who have natural curiosity and are not afraid of controversy.

The details of the seminar and the videos of the lectures can be found here:

http://async.org.uk/IvorCatt+DavidWalton.html

 

 

Profile for Horizon 2020 and opportunities for electronics for survival

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My article about building computer systems that will live without batteries, by taking energy
from the environment, in Pan European Networks Horizon 2020 series

http://horizon2020projects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ST8-Microelectronics-System_11254-Pro.pdf

Here is my research group’s partner profile for Horizon 2020 project ideas

http://horizon2020projects.com/partner-profile/partner-profile-h30130/

 

 

Technical report about survival instincts in electronic systems

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http://async.org.uk/tech-reports/NCL-EEE-MSD-TR-2013-181.pdf

I wrote this article as a chapter to Peter Cheung’s 60th birthday Festschrift.

Here is the abstract:

The writing of this paper has been inspired by the motivating ideas of
incorporating self-awareness into systems that have been studied by
Prof Cheung in connection to dealing with variability and ageing in
nano-scale electronics. We attempt here to exploit the opportunities for
making systems self-aware, and taking it further, see them in a
biological perspective of survival under harsh operating conditions.
Survivability is developed here in the context of the availability of
energy and power, where the notion of power-modulation will navigate
us towards the incorporation into system design of the mechanisms
analogous to instincts in human brain. These mechanisms are
considered here through a set of novel techniques for reference-free
sensing and elastic memory for data retention. This is only a beginning
in the exploration of system design for survival, and many other
developments such as design of self-aware communication fabric are
further on the way.

Making the most of energy

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An article about my group’s research on energy-modulated computing has been published by International Innovation. 

http://async.org.uk/p41-43-Alex-Yakovlev.pdf

International Innovation is the leading global dissemination resource for the wider scientific, technology and research communities, dedicated to disseminating the latest science, research and technological innovations on a global level. More information and a complimentary subscription offer to the publication can be found at: www.researchmedia.eu

Asynchronous Static RAM demo video

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It is now possible to see the video of our demo of the Self-timed SRAM, as it works (Write and Read) under a wide range of power supply conditions:

(1) stable levels of Vdd in the range from 1.2V down to 0.4V; and

(2) with a run-time varying supply from our Capacitor-Bank power supply (second box in the setup).

 

Showcase event of Holistic Project 11 Feb 2013 in London

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We are preparing ourselves for a showcase event in London (Imperial College) next Monday 11th February 2013:

http://www.nmi.org.uk/events/event-details/277

This showcase marks the completion of a large EPSRC project jointly with Southampton, Imperial and Bristol.

 Newcastle will feature with two talks and two demos there.

Talks:

(1) Summary of Project Outputs (Theme B) –  Alex Yakovlev (Theme B Leader, Newcastle University) at 11:30

(2) Technical Seminar 4: Energy Modulated Computing- Prof Alex Yakovlev (Newcastle University) at 14:30

Demos (at 12:00)
(1) Self-Timed SRAM for Energy Harvesting Systems (Delong Shang and Abdullah Baz)

(2) Reference free Voltage Sensing (Reza Ramezani)

 The SRAM is our key demo, which will involve showing a number of technologies developed in our group, particularly:

– a fully self-timed SRAM, which operates under a wide range of supply voltages (Delong Shang and Abdullah Baz)

– a controllable power supply based on switched cap converters, to produce a wide range of Vdds that can be applied to the SRAM (Xuefu Zhang)

towards survival instincts in computing systems

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I have recently talked about developing survival instincts in computing systems. This opens up an interesting paradigm for designing autonomous systems for applications that require them to be on earth, underwater and in space. The conditions for operation of such systems are often harsh, unpredictable and it seems most natural to look for analogies to envisage the ways of their design in the nature, in animals and humans, particularly looking at the nervous systems. Another important pathway to such systems would be to look how energy affects their behaviour and how power levels activate various layers of instinct mechanisms …

These were the ideas that I discussed in my keynote talk at NoCArc’12 in Vancouver  (http://www.unikore.it/nocarc/index.html).

Here are the slides http://www.unikore.it/nocarc/slides/yakovlev.pdfand and video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgcugX44EIg&feature=youtu.befrom