I. Introduction

"Access IC Design Laboratory" was setup in the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering , National Taiwan University, in 2000. This lab is directed by Professor An-Yeu Wu . Currently, Lab members include 11 Ph.D. students, 9 master students and several undergraduate students. Up to now, 15 Ph.D.s and 67 masters graduated from our lab, most of them have engaged in IC design domain of industry. Our Lab is located in Room 232 NTU EE Sec. Building, occupying about 46 square meter. The main hardware equipments are workstations and personal computers, software equipments are programming languages (C, MATLAB , etc.) and EDA tools (Cadence, Avant !, Synopsys, etc.).

II. Advisor

Professor An-Yeu (Andy) Wu received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1992 and 1995, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. After graduation, he returned to Taiwan, joining a faculty of National Central University in 1996. Finally, being a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University. He is proficient in VLSI / CAD, broadband access systems integrated circuit design and digital signal processing. During his research, he hopes he can expand the scope of research and be beneficial to Electrical and Computer industries, interacting and cooperating with related industries and research units continually. With the efforts of students and colleagues hand in hand, there have been excellent achievements, not only a variety of innovations be adopted, but also applied to productions practically. His research and teaching achievements are frequently awarded by National Science Council, some kinds of innovations of research and educational reform are also highly appreciated. With the sweat several years, Prof. Wu’s outstanding contributions are highly admired and concerned. Prof. Wu regards the honor steams from the sweat and tears of students over the years. He encourages that we should make unceasing progress, keep improving.

III. Research

In 1998, the CAD Group of NTU Institute of Electrical Engineering altered its name to "Integrated Circuits and CAD Group", due to the bloom of IC design. In 2001, the College of EECS founded the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, and combined the "Integrated Circuits and CAD Group" and the "Electronic Circuits Group" into the "Integrated Circuits and Systems Group", which Access Lab belongs to. In early years, Access Lab has focused on the CAD algorithms. Nowadays, Access Lab develops the various types of hardware and software applications of Silicon Intellectual Property and Intelligent Signal Processing, based on VLSI design frameworks, digital signal processing algorithms and communication theory.

"Broadband communication systems and algorithms” and ”broadband communications chip and structure design" are the current two major research areas of our lab. The former research focus on system analysis and algorithms using PC and workstation development. The latter is targeted mainly to efficient algorithms VLSI architecture design. Finally, using ASIC and FPGA to verify the correctness of theory. The laboratory can be divided into several main groups at present, carry on the following research projects separately: (1) developing the prospective bio-medical chip and medical system integration. (2) analyzing multi-model bio-physiological signals and prediction of early prognosis in stroke patients. (3) (Low-density parity-check)LDPC encoder/decoder applied in storage system. Our lab applies conventional communication DSP algorithm and communication theorem on application such as biomedical and optical storage area. The first topic is applying communicational adaptive signal processing algorithm on ultrasound beamforming system and color doppler engine. Second topic is analyzing the bio-medical and bio-neurological signal, such as ECG, BP, EEG…, of acute stroke patients to early predict the outcome of restoration based on signal processing algorithm. The last but not least, the third topic is, based on the signal property of multi-level-cell (MLC), to design an high code rate LDPC encoder/decoder that can be efficiently applied on MLC architecture.

In addition to works related to digital signal processing, in order to cope with the miniaturization of semiconductor fabrication technology and the development of multi-core technology, "Bio-inspired network-on-chip" and "Three-dimensional network-on-chip performance-thermal co-design" are two major research topics in our lab. The first topic applies bio-inspired swarm intelligence, such as the concept of colonies of ants, school of fish and flocks of birds, to micro-networking computing systems in order to realize exa-scale computing processors. Utilizing the development of bio-inspired micro-networking techniques, we provides a high performance, adaptive and fault-tolerant data communication platform. The second topics regards "High speed and high reliability 3D IC design and development", the NSC project that Prof. Wu leads. In the past we have developed a high-accuracy temperature-performance co-design platform, Access Noxim-Hotspot, through the analysis of traffic-temperature mutual coupling. In this project, we combine different areas such as thermodynamics, thermal conduction theory, queuing theory, game theory and VLSI architecture design to develop the key technologies in proactive dynamic thermal management, including temperature prediction model, adaptive routing algorithm and task mapping. Through the proactive thermal management techniques we developed, we maximizes system throughput of 3D network-on-chip system under certain thermal constraints to solve the thermal issues in 3D IC.

Although this is a new laboratory research team at National Taiwan University, it has many large-scale collaborative research projects that are under way, including 3CxDSL, Gigabits Ethernet Optical, Re-configurable computing, Equalizer and Crypto-systems, and so on. We welcome people with lofty ideals to join our team.

IV. Future

In rapid progress of IC technology, the great challenge of system-chip design has come. The vision and prospect of Access Lab are continuing to cultivate more excellent IC design talents. Seizing the advantage of IC design and production in Taiwan, we asked every graduate to have experience and ability to design IC independently and tape out. We think the prognosis for the future of the digital communication IC industry is encouraging, thus Access Lab will strengthen the training in the knowledge of communication systems to meet the need of this new trend. Besides techniques, creativity is also important now. We anticipate Access Lab could be the pioneer of the academic and technology, always innovating, having the courage to try new ideas and making the greatest effort and contribution to the academic and industry.