Reconfigurable Fabric Project
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Computation,
storage, and communication are now woven into the fabrics of our society
with much of the progress being due to the relentless march of the silicon-based
electronics technology as predicted by Moore’s Law. The emerging technology
of flexible electronics, where electronics components such as transistors
and wires are built on a thin flexible material, offers a similar opportunity
to weave computation, storage, and communication into the fabric of the
very clothing that we wear. The implications of seamlessly integrating
a large number of communicating computation and storage resources, mated
with sensors and actuators, in close proximity to the human body are quite
exciting. For example, one can imagine biomedical applications where biometric
and ambient sensors are woven into the garment of a patient or a person
in a hazardous environment to trigger or modulate the delivery of a drug.
Realizing this vision is not just a matter of developing innovative materials
for flexible electronics, along with accompanying sensors and actuators. The
characteristics of the flexible electronics technology and the novel
applications enabled by it require innovation at the system-level technology
level. The technology of electronics in flexible materials has characteristics
and computation-communication cost trade-offs that are very different from that
of silicon and PCB-based electronics. The natural applications of these systems
have environmental dynamics, physical coupling, resource constraints,
infrastructure support, and robustness requirements that are distinct from those
faced by traditional systems. This combination requires one to go beyond
thinking of these systems as traditional systems in a different flexible form
factor. Instead, a rethinking of the architecture and the design methodology for
all layers of these systems is required.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0205682.
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Last Updated on Wednesday July 02, 2003 11:02 AM -0700
Comments: rjafari@cs.ucla.edu