SBIR-STTR Award

OptiTronics will undertake a design and implementation effort to develop a general purpose processing system that can be used for implementing artificial neural networks or large scale parallel multiprocessors. The system hardware is based on digital signal processors (DSPs) organized as a multiprocessor computing platform. The proposed system can be used as a decision module in sensor/data fusion systems where large number of processing elements will enable the processing of large number of sensor signals in real time. Also, the proposed system can be used as a general purpose multiprocessor for distributed or parallel processing. The small system size requirement will be satisfied by employing 3D electronic packaging structure with a vertical integration of several VLSI electronic layers in a multiple-plane configuration. The high flexibility of the system will be obtained by combining a reconfigurable electronic hypercube interconnection network together with an optical crossbar interconnection network to achieve high speed global data transfer among processors. Design of an efficient operating system for this multiprocessor is considered one of the important tasks for this Phase I program. It is expected that the proposed system will have high processing power of - 7 GFLOPS.