UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – An international Significant Papers Committee (SPC) chose a paper co-authored by three professors in Penn State's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science along with their graduate students as one of the most significant for influencing theory and practice in the area of Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) over the last 25 years.
The paper, “A Dual-Vdd Low-power FPGA Architecture,” written in 2004 by then computer science and engineering graduate students Aman Gayasen and Kiyong Lee computer science with Professors Mahmut Kandemir, Mary Jane Irwin and Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, was among 27 named as most significant out of 1,765 papers considered for the 2015 International Conference on FPL.
“This paper presented a new technique for power management in field-programmable devices that made use of two different power supplies,” said Narayanan. “A lower power supply reduces the power consumption but also causes the circuit to slow down. This work presented an innovative approach that reduced power supply to a large fraction of the circuit, while retaining original supply voltage to critical parts, such that the entire function would not slow down.”
Papers considered were contributed between 1991 and 2014 and had to have more than nine citations per year, or more than 100 overall citations, just to get on the shortlist for consideration. The SPC then selected the 27 papers, 1.5 percent of the total, to receive the recognition.
The FPL conference is the largest meeting on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies and systems, and many important contributions have been published at the conference over the past 25 years.