Abstract: One grand goal in the design of electronics is to achieve optimal efficiency and flexibility in a tiny low power package. Chip architectures that are customized to an application domain hold great promise. However, it is extremely difficult to find optimal tradeoffs in designing a new architecture, or even to fully understand the design space.

My vision is to develop highly visual design environments for exploring low power architectures for portable / wearable devices. My goal is to create design environments that are so accessible that even non-engineers and non-scientists can contribute to exploring architectural designs and uncover efficient processes for mapping algorithms onto novel architectures. People excel at navigating complex and dynamically changing situations, recognizing recurring patterns, and identifying potential opportunities. I will show that these reasoning and problem solving skills can be brought to bear in solving real problems in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

In this talk, I will present our interactive game-like design environments - UNTANGLED and UNTANGLEDII:Unbound. UNTANGLED is designed to uncover human mapping strategies and discover novel and efficient mapping algorithms. UNTANGLED has received People's Choice Award in the Games & Apps category of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge conducted by the National Science Foundation and Science. It has been online since May 2012. To date, we have more than 11,000 mapping solutions generated by our players. UNTANGLEDII:Unbound is developed to design and explore low power designs for portable electronics. It has been online since January 2014 and we have around 600 solutions from our players. I will briefly discuss how our games can also be used to promote computational thinking among non-scientists and engineers.

My goal is to learn successful strategies from our top players, and discover novel, faster, and efficient algorithms that will allow designers to explore the design space rapidly and reach solutions quickly. Fast and effective mapping techniques have a great potential to inspire architectural innovation in the field of portable electronics.