Dr George Constantinides' research focuses on improving the flexibility and energy of computational systems..
Dr George Constantinides is a Reader in Digital Systems and Head of the Circuits and Systems Group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He has formed the Imperial spin-out company Novocore, with Dr Christos Bouganis (Electrical and Electronic Engineering).
What do you hope to achieve through your research?
Standard computer architectures like those you find in desktop PCs are general purpose and not suited to specific applications. We want to design customised systems that can be tailored to perform specialised tasks, such as real-time face recognition, automatically, without using large amounts of hardware. In embedded systems, which are small specialised systems within larger devices, such as mobile phones, the capacity to engage with apps has increased, but battery life has reduced significantly. There is a market for devices which are considerably more energy efficient.
How will you do this?
The complexity of hardware systems lies in producing the hardware itself. However, by changing the way the hardware is designed, we can ensure the hardware ends up cheap, simple and power efficient. We use FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), a technology which allows us to reconfigure hardware design, using small low energy platforms. This avoids the need to design a new chip, costing potentially millions of pounds, for every new technology.
What next?
Energy efficiency is no longer only a concern for embedded systems and companies like Google, who use computer systems that operate at the highest possible level, must now monitor their energy consumption. We are working with high performance computing specialists to find out how our technologies can be applied in these areas. Through Novocore, we are trying to bridge the gap between research and industry.
— Kailey Nolan, Imperial Innovations
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