The Geometry of Synthesis: How to make hardware out of software
| Dates: | 30 November 2011 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 16:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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Speaker: Dr Dan Ghica
Compared to CPUs, custom circuits can be faster, use less energy and be less susceptible to tampering, so there are situations when rather than executing a computer program on a processor, as is usually the case, it is desirable to generate a fixed, static, custom-designed digital circuit which implements its behaviour. This problem, "hardware compilation", raises many difficult conceptual and technical challenges, one of which is the synthesis of function calls. I will describe the progress we made in solving this problem, by using recent theoretical developments from programming language theory. I will also describe a prototype compiler constructed using this approach.
Bio: Dan R. Ghica is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research concerns the application of programming-language theoretical ideas such as game semantics, type systems, and category theory, to automated program verification and hardware synthesis. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2002 from Queen's University, Canada, after which he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (2002-2005). In 2005 he joined the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer. Between 2006-2011 he held a prestigious EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, titled "A Unified Approach to Compositional Software Modelling, Analysis and Verification".
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Kilburn Lecture Theatre 1.4
Kilburn Building
Manchester
