The ECE Department has recently been granted funding for a research effort into reconfigurable computing.
Traditional computers are programmable via an instruction set.
This approach allows reconfigurable computers to exhibit performance thousands of times higher than microprocessors on some applications. ECE's team of researchers, led by Dr. Herman Schmit , Professor Donald E. Thomas , and CS Professor Seth Copen Goldstein , are designing a family of forward-compatible programmable hardware chips, as well as compilation tools that create hardware designs directly from C or Java. Forward-compatibility will allow hardware designs created today to run increasingly faster on future generations of silicon, thereby preserving the investment of the application developer and user. These programmable hardware chips are designed to accelerate applications in the domains of signal processing, cryptography, image processing and recognition. Srihari Cadambi, Jeffrey Weener, Matthew Moe, Matthew Myers and Kevin Jaget.