Research Areas

The scope of research and development work in the VLSI Design Center broadly covers the following areas:

Hardware Design and Testing

• Development of specialized embedded processors designed to accelerate certain applications on an embedded device. Current work focuses on the development of a new embedded processor designed to accelerate variable-length coding and compute intensive decoding operations in multimedia codecs.
• Design and implementation of hardware modules used in the embedded microprocessor. Current work focuses on extending and evaluating Avieon’s MSP multimedia processor.
• Testing and verification of hardware modules developed at the research center and evaluation of open-source software packages.
  

Low-level Software Development and Testing

• Design of assemblers, debuggers and drivers for compiling, debugging and testing the aforementioned custom instructions for the programmable processor.
• Development of instruction set simulators for embedded processors.
• Modification and customization of the open-source FFMPEG multimedia codec library for testing and functional verification of hardware modules.

Current Projects

1. Programmable VLC Processor: Researchers at the center are currently developing a programmable embedded processor/special-purpose instructions for accelerating Variable Length Coding (VLC) in multimedia embedded-systems.
   
2. Testing of Avieon’s MSP Embedded Multimedia Processor: Avieon’s Neuron MSP is an embedded multimedia and signal processor that can efficiently handle compute-intensive multimedia processing tasks such as audio/video decoding, and is especially designed to be power efficient, and suitable for use in wireless devices that operate at very low-power levels. Target applications range from cell phones to the highest-quality HDTV. The Neuron MSP, has a unique SIDO (same instruction, different operation) architecture particularly useful for video and wireless applications. The work undertaken at the VLSI Research Center for the Neuron MSP processor includes development and testing of specific multimedia and signal processing instructions, hardware/software design and development, verification, testing and debugging. Most of our testing involves the implementation of codecs like H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, VLC etc. using the FFMPEG library modified to run on the Neuron MSP simulator.
   
3. Optimization of multimedia and image processing codecs and their customization for different embedded platform architectures.
   
4. Analysis of various compression techniques used in the digital world.
   
   

Projects Completed

• In the year 2006 (contributing a period of approximately eleven months) the Research Center delivered the following projects under the guidance of Dr. Aamir Farooqui:
  
  1. Assembler for Multimedia Signal Processor (MSP
  2. Debugger for MSP
  3. Verilog Test benches for MSP hardware verification
  4. Evaluation of Regression suites
  5. ALU Design Specification
  6. Study of Intel IPP conversion libraries for reverse engineering purposes.
  

Future Research Plans

• Higher Education Commission (HEC) has research grants for all kinds of well known and recognized Universities. In this regard, following actions are planned to be taken:
  A proposal will be submitted by the Research Center through Dr. Aamir Farooqui for 3-year's grants due to the Research Center, University will apply to HEC for research grant.