High Non-recurring Engineering Costs Research Articles

Agile Hardware Development and Instrumentation With PyRTL

Domain-specific architectures have emerged as a promising solution to meet growing technology demands but with this comes an urgent need to improve hardware methodologies which often have long design cycles, rely on closed source and expensive tools, and have high nonrecurring engineering costs. In this article, we describe how our work developing PyRTL, an open source Python-based Hardware Development Toolkit, has proven to be a powerful agile hardware development and analysis tool with the features to improve current methodologies. We describe how this toolkit-driven approach encourages hardware reuse using modern object-oriented programming features and present an examination of its custom intermediate representation for hardware debugging, analysis, and instrumentation. This approach has proven useful in supporting fast design iteration in a variety of domains including cryptography and machine learning.

Agile and Open-Source Hardware

The thirteen articles in this special section focus on agile and open source hardware. These papers cover variety of research topics related to fast, agile, and open hardware design, including methodologies, languages, abstractions, and simulators. As the benefits f traditional technology scaling, like Dennard Scaling and Moore’s Law, slow significantly, computer architecture is poised to enter a golden age of innovation. Domain-specific architectures (DSA) are a promising solution to continue improving computing performance, while maintaining the level of energyand area-efficiency previously found in technology scaling. Unfortunately, traditional methodologies of chip design and hardware development have created significant barriers, requiring extremely high non-recurring engineering costs in tools, labor, IPs, and time, which ultimately hold back broad adoption of DSA.

An optical relay approach to very low cost hybrid polymer-complementary metal-oxide semiconductor electrophoresis instrumentation

Electrophoresis is an integral part of many molecular diagnostics protocols and an inexpensive implementation would greatly facilitate point-of-care (POC) applications. However, the high instrumentation cost presents a substantial barrier, much of it associated with fluorescence detection. The cost of such systems could be substantially reduced by placing the fluidic channel and photodiode directly above the detector in order to collect a larger portion of the fluorescent light. In future, this could be achieved through the integration and monolithic fabrication of photoresist microchannels on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor microelectronics (CMOS). However, the development of such a device is expensive due to high non-recurring engineering costs. To facilitate that development, we present a system that utilises an optical relay to integrate low-cost polymeric microfluidics with a CMOS chip that provides a photodiode, analog-digital conversion and a standard serial communication interface. This system embodies an intermediate level of microelectronic integration, and significantly decreases development costs. With a limit of detection of 1.3±0.4nM of fluorescently end-labeled deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), it is suitable for diagnostic applications.