Computer Architecture Group

The Computer Architecture Group's speciality is all aspects of tomorrow's computing hardware including its supporting circuit and compiler technology.

Research Goals

Improvements in fabrication technology will ultimately provide the ability to construct computing devices from atomic scale components. These advances may be exploited to provide many orders of magnitude more processing power or equally impressive reductions in power consumption. The Computer Architecture Group's goal is to investigate how best to exploit these advances in order to realise a broad range of efficient, scalable and robust computing platforms. The design and implementation of computing hardware has been a major theme of the Computer Laboratory since its inception.

We believe that shifting technology characteristics and the move to highly parallel processor architectures makes this a particular exciting and challenging time for research in this area. While the ability to continue to improve the underlying fabrication technology seems certain, the ability to fully exploit such advances is quickly becoming a grand challenge for computer science. Meeting this challenge will require a step change in our approach to processor architecture together with significant advances in compiler, programming language, algorithm and operating-systems design.

The group's interests and expertise include multi-core processors and compilers, on-chip interconnection networks, novel approaches to system-timing, FPGA architectures, software programmable processing substrates and hardware security. We also have a keen interest in building chip and system prototypes in order to drive and demonstrate our research.

Acknowledgements

EPSRC
Altera, Intel, Magma, Synplicity, Virtutech (Simics), Xilinx