The future of microchips is flexible

Professor Dan Bliss, who heads the Center for Wireless Information Systems and Computational Architectures, or WISCA, received a $17 million DARPA grant to support research into flexible chip architectures.

Computational architecture has become more complex in design and manufacture, triggering an escalation in power constraints. Bliss and his team have been working to create a new platform for complex, high-performance processors that are more power efficient and easier to use, with a new kind of chip that provides an alternative processing pathway.

WISCA is developing radio chips that can mix and filter signals using software instead of hardware, allowing more devices to transmit and receive signals without interference — potentially improving mobile and satellite communications.

“Typically, you must pick either rigid, efficient processing or flexible processing that is 100 times less efficient,” said Bliss, a faculty member of the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “With our approach, we simultaneously enable both characteristics by integrating advanced accelerators; dynamic, intelligent resource management; and sophisticated runtime software. Our advances have the potential to dramatically improve systems for everything from your cellphone or WiFi router to sophisticated DOD satellites.”

The project also has implications for retooling U.S. electronics manufacturing to be more competitive on the world stage and to abate challenges to electronics security.