NEW CENTER OF EXCELLENCE ESTABLISHED AT UTAH STATE

Your cell phone does it. So does your computer. While most of us give it scarcely a thought, those handy digital devices we‚ve come to rely upon perform thousands of mathematical computations each time we use them.

Designing algorithms to enable digital devices, so indispensable to our modern lives, to compute even more rapidly is what Utah State University researcher Tamal Bose‚s work is all about. Bose and colleagues recently received funding from the State of Utah to establish USU‚s newest Center for Excellence, the Center for High-Speed Information Processing, also known by its appropriately-named acronym, CHIP. The center was awarded $115,000 per year for up to five years.

“Our goal is to develop several prototypes of fast algorithms ˆ basically, high-speed chips,” said Bose, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who will co-direct CHIP with Randy Haupt, head of USU‚s electrical and computer engineering department.

Such technology offers a number of advantages, said Bose. “Faster, cheaper, more compact and less power-hungry chips mean faster, cheaper, smaller and better products that can be produced in a faster design cycle.”

What makes Bose‚s fast algorithms unique is that they don‚t require multipliers. “By simplifying computations, we can provide greater computational power in a smaller chip area with less power.”

Bose‚s research has also attracted the attention of NASA, which awarded him a $200,000 research grant a year ago to develop fast algorithms for image compression and processing applications. During shuttle missions, he said, cameras and spectrometers acquire thousands and thousands of images that cannot be processed until the mission returns to Earth. “Much of this image data becomes lost or corrupted before it can even be processed,” said Bose. “We‚re developing filters and fast algorithms to replace missing data, clean up and compress images, and transmit those images to Earth directly from the shuttle in real-time.”

CHIP is one of three Centers of Excellence at Utah State to receive funding for fiscal year 2002-2003. The Center for Profitable Uses of Agricultural Byproducts and the Center for Smart Sensors, both established in fiscal year 2000-2001, received renewed funding of $105,000 and $120,000, respectively.

The Utah Centers of Excellence program, established in 1986, has provided seed money for a number of research centers at Utah State, which have since developed into self-sustaining enterprises.