Engineering Faculty Peng and Srivastava Awarded Patent for Computer Processor Design
April 13, 2020
BATON ROUGE, LA – LSU Electrical & Computer Engineering Professors Lu Peng and Ashok
Srivastava and former ECE PhD graduate Shaoming Chen have been issued a U.S. patent
for their invention, “Apparatuses for Increasing Off-Chip Bandwidth.”
The group’s research dates back to 2014 and was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The invention increases off-chip bandwidth by designing a circuit of switchable pins, replacing a portion of a processor’s allocated pins with switchable pins and connecting the processor to a memory interface that is configured to switch the pins between power mode and signal mode. This provides a metric that allows the interface to identify which mode is most beneficial during one millisecond intervals and then switch the pins accordingly.
"Conventional processor design allocates a large portion of off-chip pins to deliver power, leaving a small number of pins for processor signal communication,” Peng said. “We observed that the processor requires much less power than that which can be supplied during memory-intensive stages. This is due to the fact that the frequencies of processor cores waiting for data to be fetched from off-chip memories can be scaled down in order to save power without degrading performance."
Lu Peng (L) and Ashok Srivastava (R)
“This will benefit memory-intensive programs, such as big data processing and database servers.”
Peng holds three U.S. patents, including this one, and two non-provisional U.S. patent applications. All are related to computer processor design.
Srivastava holds two U.S. patents, including this one, and one provisional U.S. patent. The previously issued U.S. patent is related to testing of digital and mixed-signal VLSI chips, as well as computer processor system design.
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