Electrical & Computer Engineering     |     Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, September 28, 12:00-1:00 p.m. HH-1112

 

Radu Marculescu
Carnegie Mellon University

The Art and Science of Embedded Multimedia Systems Design: A Communication-Centric Perspective

Multimedia represents the dominant application in many embedded systems ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones and PDAs. Most of these systems are being designed using generic multiprocessor platforms rather than starting from scratch. Such design platforms are difficult to optimize but, being primarily targeted to a particular application domain, offer the promise of flexibility, low costs and time-to-market advantages. Consequently, significant research efforts are currently directed towards narrowing down the performance gap between these platform-based designs and the fully customized solutions based on traditional ASIC implementations.

This talk will bring a communication-centric perspective to this emerging research area and emphasize some research issues where the concept of "network" is at the forefront of embedded multimedia processing. We hope to impart the essence of the theoretical foundations, design implications and appropriate design methods for using the network paradigm to solve real problems in multimedia. To this end, we discuss several performance models and optimization techniques that can be used to quantitatively analyze different architectures, while reasoning about performance, energy, QoS requirements and media quality tradeoffs.


Bio:

Radu Marculescu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1998. His current research focuses on developing design methodologies and software tools for system-on-chip design, on-chip communication, and ambient intelligence.

Radu Marculescu received the NSF CAREER Award in 2001 in the area of design automation of electronic systems. He won the 2005 Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (T-VLSI) Best Paper Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society, and several Best Paper Awards from the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference and Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) in 2001 and 2003. He was also awarded the Carnegie Institute of Technology's Ladd Research Award in 2002. Dr. Marculescu is a co-founder of the IEEE workshop on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia) and currently serves as its General Chair.