A Micro Power Hardware Fabric for Embedded Computing

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) mitigate many of the problemsencountered with the development of ASICs by offering flexibility, faster time-to-market, and amortized NRE costs, among other benefits. While FPGAs are increasingly being used for complex computational applications such as signal and image processing, networking, and cryptology, they are far from ideal for these tasks due to relatively high power consumption and silicon usage overheads compared to direct ASIC implementation. A reconfigurable device that exhibits ASIC-like power characteristics and FPGA-like costs and tool support is desirable to fill this void. In this research, a parameterized, reconfigurable fabric model named as domain specific fabric (DSF) is developed that exhibits ASIC-like power characteristics for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) style applications. Using this model, the impact of varying different design parameters on power and performance has been studied. Different optimization techniques like local search and simulated annealing are used to determine the appropriate interconnect for a specific set of applications. A design space exploration tool has been developed to automate and generate a tailored architectural instance of the fabric.The fabric has been synthesized on 160 nm cell-based ASIC fabrication process from OKI and 130 nm from IBM. A detailed power-performance analysis has been completed using signal and image processing benchmarks from the MediaBench benchmark suite and elsewhere with comparisons to other hardware and software implementations. The optimized fabric implemented using the 130 nm process yields energy within 3X of a direct ASIC implementation, 330X better than a Virtex-II Pro FPGA and 2016X better than an Intel XScale processor

Spatial Intelligence as Related to Success on Regular and Constrained Electronic Puzzle Formats

This paper is focused on how spatial learners perform on regular and constrained puzzles in an online scientific game. We used UNTANGLED, an interactive game to conduct the study presented in this manuscript. Players were presented a set of puzzles in both regular and constrained versions. The motivation behind this study was to examine the success rate of spatial learners in regular and constrained settings of the same puzzles. Our results suggest that spatially intelligent participants who played both regular and constrained puzzle format of the same game showed significant differences at the p=.05 level, indicating a level of spatial intelligence that is unprecedented. These participants showed signs of spatial intelligence necessary to solve electrical engineering problems. Our findings suggest a valuable use for electronic puzzles/games to determine which students are spatially intelligent, and potentially suited to engineering. In addition, teachers could use the data from spatially directed puzzles to challenge students to heighten levels of spatial intelligence by using puzzles in non-STEM environments

Solving Electrical Engineering Puzzles Using Spatial Reasoning

The precursor of any problem-solving strategy is the visualization of the problem at hand. When dealing with problems pertaining to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas, visualization plays a very significant role in addressing the same. Several initiatives are being taken to improve the visualization skills of the students and spatial reasoning techniques have proved to be one of the most widely accepted tools for addressing the problems in the STEM field. In this paper, we specifically address the use of spatial reasoning to solve problems in the form of puzzles taken from electrical engineering and analyze the fruitfulness of employing such a strategy. The puzzles are hosted in an online interactive framework called UNTANGLED and classified into different categories on the basis of the nature of the puzzles and their difficulties. The results indicate that spatial reasoning technique indeed helped the players to successfully complete the puzzles. The interpretation of the data led to the conclusion that spatial reasoning techniques are imperative when it comes to discerning and resolving a problem, especially in the STEM domain

A Comparative Study of Gameplay of Different Sets of Players in an Engineering Mapping Game

Educators in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field are constantly employing different tools to make the process of education streamlined and fun. The digital gaming platform also called e-gaming platform has evolved as one of the key tools to make STEM education more accessible to students. UNTANGLED III is such an e-gaming platform that is based on STEM concepts and aims to bring in players from all educational backgrounds under a common platform. The data obtained from the game gave us insights on how males and females play the game. It has answered whether there are any significant differences in the gameplay strategies between males and females. The data pertaining to the types of puzzles that players, from both genders, chose and played, was also obtained. Males and females had no stark differences in the strategies that they used in solving the puzzles. They used similar kinds of moves and in fact solved similar kinds of puzzles of similar difficulty levels. During their gameplay sessions, both the males and the females visualized similar patterns in the puzzles as evident in their final solution. The performance of players from both the genders, based on the gameplay data was at par. Suggestions obtained from the current players and outreach events hold the key to increasing the overall participation in the game

Design space exploration for low-power reconfigurable fabrics

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-like programmability and Computer Aided Design (CAD), with Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)-like power characteristics for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) style applications. Using this model, architectural design space decisions are explored in order to define an energy-efficient fabric. The impact on energy and performance due to the variation of different parameters such as datawidth and interconnection flexibility has been studied. The multiplexer cardinality usage has also been studied by mapping some of the signal processing applications onto the fabric. The results point to the use of power optimized 32-bit width computational elements interconnected by low cardinality multiplexers like 4:1 multiplexers. I

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation in an Interactive Engineering Game

In this paper, we study intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in players playing an electrical engineering gaming environment. We used UNTANGLED, a highly interactive game to conduct this study. This game is developed to solve complex mapping problem from electrical engineering using human intuitions. Our goal is to find whether there are differences in the ways anonymous players solved electrical engineering puzzles in an electronic gaming environment when motivated to play competitively, as compared to self-regulated play. For our experiments, we used puzzles from four games from UNTANGLED. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was calculated on participants’ scores, type of plays, number of plays, and time spent playing, as both self-regulated and competitive players. We also examined difference between the type of moves used by the competitive and self-regulated players. Our results support the theory of motivation as being internally embedded in learners. The results also demonstrate that a self-regulated learner does not require motivation to improve one’s performance