Incorporating skills in engineering, visual design, industrial design, and human-computer interaction, MAYA Design Group will design and develop a functional prototype of a handheld Personal Information Portal. The Personal Information Portal will provide instant availability of multiple, disparate functions such as a cordless phone, Web access, TV remote control, VCR/DVD remote control, call ID, and a complete home-automation interface available from any room.

Mobile/wearable systems are the next logical step in the evolution of computing. The result of this project will be a fully equipped, 600MHz wearable computer with 128MB of DRAM, a 340MB hard drive, and a spread spectrum radio in a package about the size of a deck of cards. When built, this computer should be the most powerful wearable computer available.

RFIDs or RF Tags function as "smart" bar codes which can be scanned remotely by a radio signal. This program will develop a prototype of a low-cost, fully functional transmitter/repeater (approx. 0.5"x0.5"x0.13") requiring almost no power to operate. Such a device will enable, for example, low cost inventory control of very large supermarkets, department stores, and warehouses from a single office.

The need for high-speed portable multimedia workstations, laptops, and PDAs is expected to accelerate the use of broadband indoor wireless access. The thrust of this project is to develop a novel transceiver optical antenna system using infrared light that would enable easy, high bandwidth connectivity within homes and offices.

In the next five years, semiconductor fabrication technologies will allow the integration of nearly 100,000,000 transistors on a single chip, running at speeds up to 3,000MHz, thus enabling complete System On Chip (SoC) designs. Counter to current practice, these high levels of integration will require the simultaneous design of hardware and software. This program focuses on the development of computer-aided design tools to enable this type of hardware/software co-design in very large and complex SoCs such as those required for next-generation internet switches and high level cryptography.

As more and more functionality is integrated into smaller and smaller chips, power consumption and dissipation become major system design issues. The project proposed here will provide a software system to characterize and model the power of major components of a SoC design and allow the design to be optimized for the lowest possible power operation.

This program focuses on the issues of speech activation and interaction with the personal digital assistant of the future. Specifically, the algorithms and protocols required for these devices to interact with multiple people simply and reliably will be developed and demonstrated in the context of a voice-queried phone book and web browser.

With the increasing use of computer clusters in a diverse set of work environments, it has become essential to design high performance network interconnects with high level quality of service (QoS) guarantees. The proposed research will concentrate on the design, fabrication, and testing of a new high performance switched network router, called MediaWorm, which can provide the required level of quality.

In today's exploding mobile multimedia appliance market, current chip designers are increasingly challenged to match the needs of very high processing performance and low power (battery) operation. This program attacks the complexity of multimedia algorithms, such as streaming video, and will develop simplified mathematical software functions which will provide the required level of computational performance at lower power levels.

One of the key technologies in human-computer interaction is physical modeling to create realistic virtual worlds, such as the Pod Racer scene in Star Wars, with which a person can easily interact. At present, such modeling is relatively slow. The main goal of the SPARTA project is to develop extremely fast physical modeling through the use of specialized chip hardware in order to better interact with these virtual worlds in real-time.