Alex Chan

Email: a.chan@ncl.ac.uk

Supervisors

• School of Engineering
• Professor Alex Yakovlev
• Dr Danil Sokolov
• School of Computing
• Dr Victor Khomenko

Project description

In recent decades, there has been a rapid growth and interest in asynchronous circuit design. This has resulted in a wide variety of different approaches. Asynchronous design can even be applied to other areas of applications, such as Analog and Mixed Signal systems, memory compilers, and the emerging IoT devices.

Despite this, there is still an underlying limited usage of it in commercial areas. This is because circuit designers are required to adapt. The rather cumbersome designs, which either end up using more power, time and/or area, is also an issue.

This project investigates these issues. It proposes the use of Distributed Finite State Machines (DFSM). These are collections of FSMs connected to each other by common input/output signals. They provide circuit designers with a model they can easily understand. They also provide the ability to express concurrent communicating FSMs.

Because of the natural structure of DFSMs, the complexity of monolithic models can be significantly reduced, saving power and area). The productivity of circuit designers is also impoved with complex composite systems, saving time.

Interests

• algorithms
• computer hardware and software
• distributed asynchronous control
• finite state machines
• Petri nets

Qualifications

BSc Computer Science with Industrial Placement, Newcastle University (2018)