User:Jcarroll/Brent Nelson BYU

My [Dr. Nelson's] areas of research are in the broad field of

path planning. A second area of focus is CAD algorithms for CCM's. Recent work has included contributions to the development of JHDL and synthesis tools for finite field arithmetic. Future work is concentrating on application-specific compilation tools

for CCM's.

Reconfigurable computing

Reconfigurable computing is a computing paradigm combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like

ASICs

) is the possibility to adapt the hardware during runtime by "loading" a new circuit on the reconfigurable fabric.

VLSI

Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistor-based circuits into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device. The term is no longer as common as it once was, as chips have increased in complexity into the hundreds of millions of transistors.

Genetic Algorithm

A genetic algorithm (GA) is a

inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover (also called recombination

).

Path Planning

Motion planning is a term used in robotics for the process of detailing a task into atomic robotic motions.

This issue, also known as the "navigation problem", though simple for humans, is one of the most challenging in computer science and robotics. The problem is in creating an algorithm that would be able to find its way around a room with obstacles, perhaps accomplishing some task on the way.

JHDL

JHDL (Just-Another Hardware Description Language) is a low level

field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Particular attention was paid to supporting the Xilinx

series of chips.

When the design is ready to be placed in a fabric, the developer simply generates an

FPGAs

.

JHDL was developed at BYU in the Configurable Computing Laboratory, the project initiated in 1997 [1].

Finite Field Arithmetic

Arithmetic in a finite field is different from standard integer arithmetic. There are a limited number of elements in the finite field; all operations performed in the finite field result in an element within that field.

Finite fields are used in a variety of applications, including linear block codes such as

Galois fields

, making these fields especially popular choices for applications.

There are infinitely many different finite fields; however, their number of elements (or

positive integer, and two finite fields of the same size are isomorphic. The prime p is the characteristic of the field, and the positive integer n is the dimension of the field over its prime field

.