David Black-Schaffer

Ph.D., June 2008
Stanford University
Department of Electrical Engineering
Concurrent VLSI Architecture Group

davidbbs@cva.stanford.edu

Research

Efficient Embedded Computing: Can we build a programmable architecture that is energy- and performance- competitive with standard cell ASIC designs?

This is an intriguing area of research because embedded algorithms are becoming increasingly complicated at the same time as ASIC tape-out costs are increasing. These two trends lead to an enormous increase in the cost of designing ASICs for modern embedded systems. However, by analyzing where ASICs achieve a power-advantage over programmable devices we hope to be able to design an architecture and a set of software tools that will enable an efficient embedded computing architecture.

Efficient Embedded Computing:

Block Parallel Programming for Real-Time Applications on Multi-core Processors (April 2008, doctoral dissertation)
Hierarchical Instruction Register Organization (April 2008, Computer Architecture Letters) (details, unpublished)
An Energy-Efficient Processor Architecture for Embedded Systems (J. Balfour, March 2008, Computer Architecture Letters)

Previous work:

Dynamically Loaded Instruction Registers (July 2006, unpublished)

Other "Academic" Activities

High-performance Easy-to-setup Computer Clusters - Computers are simple; users are not. Building a 40-node cluster is easy; keeping the users (and hackers) from abusing it is not.
DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 - I was tangentially involved with this amazing effort.
Aerospace Robotics Lab - I did some work on computer vision for climbing robots when I first arrived at Stanford before moving on to computer architecture.
A lot of TAing, in particular, for EE108a, the undergrad intro to digital design class. I spent a lot of time re-writing the labs to make the flow more smoothly.

Personal

I attended Phillips Academy Andover and earned an AB with a major in Engineering from Dartmouth College. I received my M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, and met my wife here while she was on an exchange program from Linköpings Universitet in Sweden. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford.

Interests

Photography - A hobby of mine since middle school. I finally got a digital SLR after years of being stuck with a point-and-shoot. (Although, to be perfectly honest, with a bit of work you can get some really amazing images from a point-and-shoot camera. Check out this 20 megapixel image of Stanford Memorial Church taken with a 4MP point-and-shoot. I've also made a script to export IPTC keywords to the filename of an image from Lightroom.) My collection of pictures of Hoover Tower at Stanford University is also interesting. I particularly like the rainbow behind Hoover Tower shots.
Hiking - California, and particularly the bay area, is an absolutely amazing place for hiking and my wife is very fond of it.
Soccer - I'm not nearly as good as my wife's team, but it's a lot of fun to play.
Swedish Culture & Language - It is amazing how really getting to know another culture changes your perspective on your own.
Interesting quotes - technical and amusing.
Scripts for Macs
Tracking things like the number of pictures I've taken and the real fuel economy of our honda civic...