Registered Speakers

Thomas M. Coughlin

Professor Hideharu Amano

Department of Computer Science Keio University 3-14-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama 223, Japan Biography

1. Dynamically Reconfigurable Processors - flexible off-loading engines for Embedded Applications
Dynamically Reconfigurable Processors have been started to be utilized as an off-load engine for various types of System-on-Chips (SoCs) in digital appliances.  In order to achieve better area- and power-efficiency compared with traditional field-programmable devices such as FPGAs, they incorporate the following properties; (1) a simple coarse grained processor consisting of an ALU, a data manipulator, a register file and other functional modules is used as a primitive processing element (PE) of an array, and (2) dynamic reconfiguration of the PE array which enables time-multiplexed execution is introduced. Some of them provide multiple sets of configuration data called hardware contexts and switch them in one or a few clock cycles, and others can change its configuration in several micro seconds.
Based on the experience of the first generation chips; Chameleon's CS2112, NEC's DRP-1 and IPFlex's DAPDNA, recent dynamically reconfigurable processors; NEC's Xbridge, IPFlex's DAPDNA-IMX, Toshiba's SAKE and SANYO's reconfigurable car turner; are specialized for a specific field of applications, and adopt multi-core structure using small PE arrays.  Especially in Japan, some of them are embedded in real commercial products.  In this talk, the fundamental structure, benefits, problems and recent products are introduced.

System Architect Pierre de Greef

NXP Semiconductors Biography

1. Vibrant Picture Quality for Dispay Systems
LCD panels are the main stream TV displays. High-end TV’s are now featured with 120 Hz full-HD panels. Yet, the picture quality of these display systems can still be improved in the field of: sharpness, noise-rejection, black-level, contrast, brightness, color-gamut, motion-judder, motion-blur, power-efficiency, styling and costs. In this tutorial all these quality aspects are addressed and state-of-the-art system solutions are discussed for mobile and home applications.
Scaling and sharpening are used to address the high spatial resolution of these displays. Advanced RGB-LED backlight systems contribute to an improved picture quality, as they enable techniques as Adaptive Local Dimming which is used to improve black-level and contrast, while at the same time saving power or boosting brightness. Agile dimming implementations can be used to drive slim, side-lit LCD displays. Furthermore, Adaptive Color Gamut Mapping is required to enable realistic and vivid color reproduction, Wide Gamut and uniform light distribution. Natural Motion technology can be used to reduce motion-judder and motion-blur on fast display panels. As display resolutions and refresh-rates are still increasing, there is a demand for more processing power and bandwidth, hence advance system architectures are required to provide cost effective solutions.
2. Picture Quality and power deduction for mobile display systems
Mobile display systems must be able to render spatial and temporal compressed video. They require low power and optimal picture quality. Video enhancement features like up-scaling, sharpening and motion-compensated field-insertion, combined with display enhancement features, improve the Picture Quality. In addition, Adaptive Contrast & Backlight Control reduces the system power.
3. Adaptive backlight for LCD-TV systems
Light leaking through LCD panels driven to black, can be observed as a poor black-level, limiting the contrast ratio. Adaptive Dimming technology can be applied to attenuate the backlight, improving image quality and saving power. The limited transmittance of LCD panels can be observed as a waist of energy, leading to a limited brightness. The transmission of the LCD-panel should be maximized and Adaptive Boosting technology can be used to drive the backlight beyond 100%. When combining these technologies:

• Global Dimming enables the contrast to increase up to 5 times (CCFL/EEFL). 
• Local Dimming can increase spatial contrast up to a factor of 100 and the temporal contrast may increase to infinite (LED). 
At the same time, up to 50% average power may be saved!
4. Green Screen
Increasing energy demand, global climate change and constrained energy supplies are likely to impact our lives in the future. As society demands less waist of energy, Governments are creating regulations to promote energy effient products (e.g. Energy Star).
There are about 275 million TVs currently in use in the U.S., consuming over 50 billion kWh of energy each year — or 4 percent of all households' electricity use. This is enough electricity to power all the homes in the state of New York for an entire year.
The display takes a large portion of the energy consumed in applications like TV, computing and mobile phone. New technologies can be applied to reduce the power consumption of these systems. Our Silicon and Software System Solutions take various display and backlight technolgies into account and apply advanced video and display enhancement techniques to reduce the system power, yet maintain the overall Picture Quality

Assistent Professor Samuel H. Russ, Ph. D.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of South Alabama 307 N. University Blvd. Mobile, AL 36688, USA Biography

1. Circuit Design Techniques for High-Speed Digital Systems
Digital systems continue to grow faster. New technologies such as Serial ATA run at Gigabit per second transmission rates. How are systems designed to work correctly at these extremely high speeds? What skills will the engineer of the future need? This is a review of high-speed circuit design and signal-integrity techniques drawing on the speaker’s extensive industry experience and class on the subject.
2. What’s inside my DVR (TiVO)?
A digital video recorder (DVR) makes an interesting piece of consumer electronics because it contains almost every type of electrical and electronic circuit, including power supplies, microprocessors, analog audio and video, and RF (radio frequency) circuits. This provides an interesting overview of consumer electronics for students considering electrical engineering careers.
3. DVR Performance Optimization
As common as digital video recorder technology has become, little work has been published on how to optimize DVR performance. By creating an end-to-end analysis framework (starting from the mechanical motion of the hard disk drive and ending at the MPEG decoder), it becomes possible to determine the performance bottlenecks and improve DVR performance. This is very important today because home networking technologies will cause DVRs to become small video servers in the home.
4. In-Home Networking: Technology and Performance
Home networking technology continues to grow and expand. Home networking for video is relatively new, however, because of the stringent demands of broadcast-quality video. Starting with the needs of commercial-grade video, this overview explains current technologies and their deployments, and shows which ones are “not ready for prime time”. The results may be surprising to some.

Nasser Kehtarnavaz