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Continuing Innovation in Information Technology Workshop Report (2016) / Chapter Skim
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3 Advancing the Hardware Foundation
Pages 33-40

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From page 33...
... This chapter summarizes presentations by Margaret Martonosi, on the evolution of computer architectures that balance capabilities and speed against the limitations of energy and heat, and Thad Starner, on the history and development of wearable computers.
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From page 34...
... Margaret Martonosi, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, is known for her work on computer architecture. Coined in a 1964 IBM paper,1 the term computer architecture refers to the field of computer design concerned with balancing competing factors such as computing performance, power needs, cost, and reliability.
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From page 35...
... Even the developers of ENIAC, the first electronic computer, developed by Mauchly and Eckert in the mid1940s, paid careful attention to its power use, which was about 150-175 kilowatts.2 Ever since those early days, when a computer architecture design hit its power limit, there was a new technology to switch to: first there were relays, then vacuum tubes, then bipolar transistors, and then metal-oxide semiconductors. Today, Martonosi said, computer architects are once again facing power limits, but the difference this time is that there is no ready new technology to switch to that would enable computers to increase their productivity without hitting thermal constraints.
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From page 36...
... At this point, parallelism research and power research, once separate computer science areas, converged, and the joint research led to the invention of computer chips that contain many specialized, hetero geneous processors to carry out the hundreds of computations made by today's devices.4 Martonosi explained that the progress from one technological advancement to the next has not always been linear. As on-chip parallelism was integrated into more products, starting in the mid-2000s, computer architects reached back into decades of DARPA- and NSF-funded parallelism research to improve capabilities in this area.
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From page 37...
... But the technology behind today's wearable computers has followed a circuitous and at times surprising path through government-funded academic research, the experiments of hobbyists and tinkerers, and commercialization by multinational technology companies. Today's wearables are made possible by myriad component technologies, such as speech recognition, lithium-powered batteries, cloud computing, and innovative architectures that allow computers to be lightweight, low power, and seamlessly integrated into people's daily lives.
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From page 38...
... Rehabilitation specialists are looking into wearable robotics, a truly cross-disciplinary field, to help patients recover muscle strength or limb movement after an injury. Of course, Starner noted, giving computers such access to our bodies and our health information means that privacy and data protection are crucial whenever wearable computing is discussed or designed.
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From page 39...
... Starner's homegrown device presaged his eventual involvement in developing Google Glass, a cutting-edge commercial product designed to fulfill a similar need, albeit in a format that is more appealing to the general public than Starner's original bulky apparatus. The early 2000s saw a significant push toward mobile wearable computing as smartphones took off and displays grew smaller.
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From page 40...
... Finding no existing standard for personal-area net works and unable to deploy wearables for its employees without such a standard, FedEx convened experts to create the one used today, IEEE 802.15.6. While wearables might seem, to the casual observer, as if they arrived overnight, Starner stressed that today's consumer wearables could be traced down a long path from the hobbyist researcher and the federally funded lab to military applications to consumer products.
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Key Terms

  • google glass
  • wearable computers
  • wearable computing
  • power usage
  • computer architectures

  • computer architects
  • wearable computer
  • computer design
  • power constraints
  • wearable technology

  • power modeling
  • speech recognition
  • martonosi described
  • thad starner
  • energy efficient

  • led directly
  • dynamic voltage
  • voltage scaling
  • health information
  • margaret martonosi

  • seamlessly integrated
  • whenever wearable
  • tional computer
  • computer industry
  • mainstream computer

  • support computer
  • power supply
  • address power
  • facing computer
  • wearable glucose


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