Research Info

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Current Projects:

For my dissertation, I used probabilistic transfer matrices to compute circuit and system reliabilities implemented with electrostatic and magnetic quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) devices. My goal was to identify the component error rates required to develop reliable circuits. With this knowledge, we can then determine if components with manufacturing defects may be feasible if device level redundancy is used (i.e. thicker electrostatic QCA wires). To do this, I built a new electrostatic QCA simulator and determined the reliability of various electrostatic QCA straight wires given various levels of device redundancy.

My post-doc research is likely to revolve around two or three major topics. The first is on applications for magnetic QCA. Given how clocking is expected to work in magnetic QCA, memory and systolic architectures are the most promising applications. The second topic will be on modeling energy usage in high-performance computing systems. In particular, we are interested in how much energy is required to deliver data to the processor in an exascale system (1000 petaflops). Lastly, we will be investigating different methods for organizing memory in high-performance computing systems.

For reference, a basic introduction to electrostatic QCA can be found on the QCADesigner website here. Magnetic QCA is similar in nature to electrostatic QCA if you consider a single magnet to be roughly equivalent to half of an electrostatic cell (differences occur in the majority gates and vertical wire structures). Since QCA is a misnomer for the magnetic implementation, the term nanomagnetic logic is being utilized instead. A large number of papers (and references to many more) can be found here.

My informal reflections from IWQCA 2009 (1st International Workshop on QCA) can be found here. [PDF]

Research Interests:

Note: I would highly encourage anyone with questions on QCA and/or QCADesigner to join the Yahoo group qca_design and post their question to that list. Links to the group page and joining the mailing list can be found at www.qcadesigner.ca

QCADesigner Contributions:

Note: The above contributions have not been introduced into the release versions of QCADesigner at the discretion of its caretakers. The XML file format components are included here and I may still have a version of QCADesigner with a digital logic simulation method, but I'm not certain. At the very least, I have a stand alone version of the digital logic simulation engine.

Publications:

Undergraduate projects supervised: