Microprocessors: the engines of the digital age

The microprocessor—a computer central processing unit integrated onto a single microchip—has come to dominate computing across all of its scales from the tiniest consumer appliance to the largest supercomputer. This dominance has taken decades to achieve, but an irresistible logic made the ultimate outcome inevitable. The objectives of this Perspective paper are to offer a brief history of the development of the microprocessor and to answer questions such as: where did the microprocessor come from, where is it now, and where might it go in the future

UTPA Undergraduate Catalog 2007-2009

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/edinburglegacycatalogs/1074/thumbnail.jp

The rhetoric of Americanisation: social construction and the British computer industry in the Post-World War II period

This research seeks to understand the process of technological development in the UK and the specific role of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’ in that process. The concept of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’ will be developed throughout the thesis through a study into the computer industry in the UK in the post-war period. Specifically, the thesis discusses the threat of America, or how actors in the network of innovation within the British computer industry perceived it as a threat and the effect that this perception had on actors operating in the networks of construction in the British computer industry. However, the reaction to this threat was not a simple one. Rather this story is marked by sectional interests and technopolitical machination attempting to capture this rhetoric of ‘threat’ and ‘falling behind’. In this thesis the concept of ‘threat’ and ‘falling behind’, or more simply the ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’, will be explored in detail and the effect this had on the development of the British computer industry. What form did the process of capture and modification by sectional interests within government and industry take and what impact did this have on the British computer industry? In answering these questions, the thesis will first develop a concept of a British culture of computing which acts as the surface of emergence for various ideologies of innovation within the social networks that made up the computer industry in the UK. In developing this understanding of a culture of computing, the fundamental distinction between the US and UK culture of computing will be explored. This in turn allows us to develop a concept of how Americanisation emerged as rhetorical construct. With the influence of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’, the culture of computing in the UK began to change and the process through which government and industry interacted in the development of computing technologies also began to change. In this second half of the thesis a more nuanced and complete view of the nature of innovation in computing in the UK in the sixties will be developed. This will be achieved through an understanding of the networks of interaction between government and industry and how these networks were reconfigured through a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’. As a result of this, the thesis will arrive at a more complete view of change and development within the British computer industry and how interaction with government influences that change

UTPA Undergraduate Catalog 2009-2011

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/edinburglegacycatalogs/1075/thumbnail.jp

UTPA Undergraduate Catalog 2011-2013

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/edinburglegacycatalogs/1076/thumbnail.jp

1996-1997, University of Memphis bulletin

University of Memphis bulletin containing the undergraduate catalog for 1996-1997.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1443/thumbnail.jp

A hardware-software codesign framework for cellular computing

Until recently, the ever-increasing demand of computing power has been met on one hand by increasing the operating frequency of processors and on the other hand by designing architectures capable of exploiting parallelism at the instruction level through hardware mechanisms such as super-scalar execution. However, both these approaches seem to have reached a plateau, mainly due to issues related to design complexity and cost-effectiveness. To face the stabilization of performance of single-threaded processors, the current trend in processor design seems to favor a switch to coarser-grain parallelization, typically at the thread level. In other words, high computational power is achieved not only by a single, very fast and very complex processor, but through the parallel operation of several processors, each executing a different thread. Extrapolating this trend to take into account the vast amount of on-chip hardware resources that will be available in the next few decades (either through further shrinkage of silicon fabrication processes or by the introduction of molecular-scale devices), together with the predicted features of such devices (e.g., the impossibility of global synchronization or higher failure rates), it seems reasonable to foretell that current design techniques will not be able to cope with the requirements of next-generation electronic devices and that novel design tools and programming methods will have to be devised. A tempting source of inspiration to solve the problems implied by a massively parallel organization and inherently error-prone substrates is biology. In fact, living beings possess characteristics, such as robustness to damage and self-organization, which were shown in previous research as interesting to be implemented in hardware. For instance, it was possible to realize relatively simple systems, such as a self-repairing watch. Overall, these bio-inspired approaches seem very promising but their interest for a wider audience is problematic because their heavily hardware-oriented designs lack some of the flexibility achievable with a general purpose processor. In the context of this thesis, we will introduce a processor-grade processing element at the heart of a bio-inspired hardware system. This processor, based on a single-instruction, features some key properties that allow it to maintain the versatility required by the implementation of bio-inspired mechanisms and to realize general computation. We will also demonstrate that the flexibility of such a processor enables it to be evolved so it can be tailored to different types of applications. In the second half of this thesis, we will analyze how the implementation of a large number of these processors can be used on a hardware platform to explore various bio-inspired mechanisms. Based on an extensible platform of many FPGAs, configured as a networked structure of processors, the hardware part of this computing framework is backed by an open library of software components that provides primitives for efficient inter-processor communication and distributed computation. We will show that this dual software–hardware approach allows a very quick exploration of different ways to solve computational problems using bio-inspired techniques. In addition, we also show that the flexibility of our approach allows it to exploit replication as a solution to issues that concern standard embedded applications

2003 July, University of Memphis bulletin

Vol. 89 of the University of Memphis bulletin containing the undergraduate catalog for 2003-04, 2003 July.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1190/thumbnail.jp

UTPA Undergraduate Catalog 2013-2015

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/edinburglegacycatalogs/1077/thumbnail.jp

1997-1999, University of Memphis bulletin

University of Memphis bulletin containing the undergraduate catalog for 1997-1999.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1444/thumbnail.jp