Michael A. Sheets

Publications

Arranged in reverse chronological order

M. Sgroi, M. Sheets, A. Mihal, K. Keutzer, S. Malik, J. Rabaey, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.  "Addressing the System-on-a-Chip Interconnect Woes Through Communication-Based Design," Proceedings Design Automation Conference.  Las Vegas, NV, June 2001.

J. L. da Silva Jr., J. Shamberger, M. J. Ammer, C. Guo, S. Li, R. Shah, T. Tuan, M. Sheets, J. Rabaey, B. Nikolic, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, P. Wright.  "Design methodology for PicoRadio networks," Proceedings Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference.  Munich, Germany, March 2001.

Research Projects

PicoRadio III - The goal is to develop of meso-scale, low-cost transceivers for ubiquitous wireless data acquisition that minimizes power/energy dissipation.  As the Chief Architect of the PicoRadio III prototype, I am researching event-driven power management architectures for use in reactive system on chip designs.

PicoRadio II - AKA Two Chip Intercom (TCI), the PicoRadio II project is focused on design methodology for wireless networks.  It has two main component, ie. two chips: a protocol processor and a baseband processor.  

    Protocol Processor - Design entry into Co-design Finite State Machines (CFSMs) was done using VCC from Cadence.  About 50 of CFSMs were manually translated into Verilog state machine descriptions.  My addition to this project was debugging and simulating these state machines in a system with an embedded Tensilica Xtensa microprocessor, a flash memory controller, input/output interface, and interconnect generated by tools from Sonics, Inc.  I also performed synthesis, timing simulations, and the entire timing-driven back-end flow.

    Baseband Processor  - Consisting of a 1.6 Mbit/s DSSS baseband receiver and transmitter, the baseband chip is really Josie Ammer's baby.  My contribution was a mostly working course timing acquisition block that searches for pilot tones using matched filtering of several interleaved incoming signal streams.

Class Projects

I have numerous class projects which I will someday collect and describe here.