Custom Silicon for Low-Cost Information Dissemination among Illiterate People Groups.

VLSI;Low-Cost;Electrical Engineering;Engineering;Electrical Engineering

Foo, ZhiYoongDutta, Prabal ;

University of Michigan

关键词: VLSI;    Low-Cost;    Electrical Engineering;    Engineering;    Electrical Engineering;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/102429/zhiyoong_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In this work, we present an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) device that improves the quality of life of the poorest people in the world by enabling information access through Very Large Scale Integrated chips.Identified as agrarian farmers that subsist on less than $2 a day, the world’s poorest people face many challenges that make developing an ICT device difficult. We argue that prior devices do not adequately overcome the unique problems of: cost, power, connectivity, usability, robustness, and illiteracy. We show that while many of these constraints need to be addressed, cost represents the greatest fundamental challenge to widespread use and adoption of ICT devices.To address this challenge, this thesis presents a custom silicon chip design referred to as ;;Literacy in Technology” (LIT). LIT enables an audio computer ICT device to overcome the constraints through a number of techniques: A high level of integration of the components on a single die reduces its cost and form-factor. LIT’s power management system ensures long lifetime through energy consumption reduction by exploiting unique characteristics of Carbon-Zinc batteries, common in the developing world. Its Hybrid Switch Capacitor Network addresses off-chip component cost by using only inexpensive capacitors, further reducing cost. LIT’s unique memory hierarchy, a large on-chip cache backed directly by NAND Flash combined with a simple and low area core, reduces cost by not requiring DRAM or NOR Flash. LIT’s power-on-reset and brown-out-detection overcomes Carbon-Zinc battery’s high hysteresis resulting in higher robustness. LIT further reduces cost through overloading the functionality of PCB traces as both a human input interface and as information transfer from device to device.We show how LIT and its unique solutions allow us to develop an ICT device targeted towards developing regions at a total estimated electronics cost of less than $6. Furthermore, LIT reduces recurring costs through lowered energy consumption and increased robustness when compared to previous ICT devices. Although many of our novel technical contributions were motivated by strong price elasticity in developing regions, the techniques developed are equally applicable to rugged, low-power systems targeted at mainstream applications.