Baras, Martins part of $9 million funding for microelectronics and systems research

Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR) is the Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor Nuno Martins (ECE/ISR) is a co-PI for the University of Maryland’s portion of a major new Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) research grant to establish a multi-university Focused Center (FC) for research in microelectronics and systems, the “Multi-Scale Systems Design Center (MuSyC).” The project’s total initial budget for the first three years is $9 million.

MuSyC is part of the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP) of the SRC, administered by the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation (MARCO), a subsidiary of the SRC. DARPA is participating in this program. The FCRP addresses major challenges in semiconductor and systems technology through long-range, innovative research. The overall goal of this collaborative effort between the Department of Defense and industry is to sustain the unprecedented multi-decade record of uninterrupted performance improvement in information processing power and storage.

Baras and Martins are part of a consortium team, led by the University of California Berkeley, which won the recent competition to create a new Focus Center on Multi-Scale Systems, with the overall goal to discover and enable optimal application architectures for complex systems operating in many temporal and spatial dimensions. Two FCs were initially established in 1998, two more in 2001 and one more in 2003, for a total of five previous FCs with focus areas: Nanoelectronic Materials and Processes; Structures and Devices; Connectivity; Circuits & Modules; and Information Systems Platform Design. The recent competition was a re-competition of the previous FCs and a new competition for the sixth FC, focusing on Multi-Scale Systems. Each FC funding can reach the level of $8M per year, while the overall FCRP funding may reach a level of $50M per annum, depending on research progress and availability of funds.

The initial period of performance for each of the recently awarded FCs is three years, with the research expected to start in November 2009. There exist options for three-year renewals, dependent on the overall success of the program, the technical progress of the Centers, and the availability of funds. The University of Maryland’s part of the project is worth initially $946K over the first three years, and is expected to increase commensurably as the overall budget of the new center increases from the initial year of funding at $3M to a potential $8M per year. Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE/UMIACS) is a potential additional UMD Co-PI in MuSyC under an option that is included for potential future funding.

The previously established FCs have been concerned with research aimed at addressing anticipated intractable barriers and fundamental limits to the historic rate of progress in microelectronics performance, size, and cost. The sponsors came to the conclusion that, in addition to continued research in these areas of microelectronics, the time has come to expand the overall program to include a focus on research solutions for the challenges of the next level of integration; the need to form a new Center that will address the research needs at the fully integrated system level.

MuSyC addresses the conception, implementation, validation and management of distributed information technology systems that have important features at multiple scales—which could be spatial, temporal, functional, or technological. Linking between scales and taming complexity are the main challenges to be addressed. The grand goal of the MuSyC is to create a comprehensive and systematic solution to the distributed multi-scale system design challenge. While addressing the full portfolio of needs, the MuSyC team has specifically selected as grand challenge the development of “energy-smart” distributed systems: that is, distributed systems that are deeply aware of the balance between energy availability and demand, and adjust their behavior in response through dynamic and adaptive optimization through all scales of the design hierarchy. Intelligent “energy management, distribution, and utilization” is one of the most prominent societal applications of the distributed IT platform of the future.

Overlaying the entire MuSyC research program is a unified methodology addressing the specification, optimization, synthesis and run-time management of complex distributed sense-and-control systems such that long-term reliable and efficient operation is ensured. To explore the various dimensions of the multi-scale space, the development of specific technologies and solutions is divided over two vertical themes, called “large-scale systems” and “small-scale systems” respectively. At the intersection of the two are “intermediate-scale systems” such as mobiles and portables, which is included as a potential option for future expansion of MuSyC.

Professors Baras and Martins will contribute in the research areas of Distributed Control Algorithms (distributed real time control, distributed estimation with communication costs, optimal resource allocation including energy in distributed control, taxonomy of structure versus behavior, Security and Trust (coalitional security, composite trust and its effects on distributed sense and control performance, physical layer authentication and compositional security, policies and semi-rings and vulnerabilities, energy versus security and trust tradeoff), Attention-optimized Multi-scale Systems (stochastic feedback control methods for multiscale systems, biologically-inspired attentional-adaptive schemes, Real-Time information flow management), Microscopic System Platform Demonstrator.

The MuSyC research team consists of 19 (24) principal investigators (PIs) from 10 (11) US universities, each of them a world-leader in their respective fields. The participating Universities are: UC Berkeley (lead), Caltech, North Carolina State U, Rice U, Stanford U, UC San Diego, U Southern California, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U of Maryland College Park, U of Michigan, (UPenn). The world-renown faculty research team includes four members of the US NAE, six endowed chaired professors, and winners of several prestigious awards for research and education from IEEEE, ACM and ASEE.