Nuts and Bold Ideas Seminar

"Music, Nirvana, and the End of Moore's Law"
Dr. Nick Macias
Cell Matrix http://www.cellmatrix.com
Tuesday, May 24, 1-2pm
FAB 155

This talk will begin with the possibility that Moore's Law may soon end, not by a flattening out of the transistor vs. time curve, but by a sudden, dramatic increase in the slope of that curve. The question of how to manage a transistor budget several orders of magnitude beyond today's largest devices will lead us into discussions of philosophy, self-awareness, and back to engineering in the context of self-modifying circuitry. A particular architecture for self-modifying circuits will be presented, and examples will be given for how this feature can help manage extremely complex systems. Potential extensions of this work will be discussed, including the possibility of computing systems comprised of a set of vibrations.

Nick Macias has been interested in the concept of self-modifying hardware since 1986. He is a co-founder and vice president of Cell Matrix Corporation, a research company dedicated to the exploration and development of self-modifying hardware. He has worked in both industry and government, and has spent the past 18 years working part-time in the field of quantitative investing. He has presented at numerous conferences, authored journal papers and book chapters, been an adviser to graduate students, and taught a semester-length class on Cell Matrix concepts in 2009. He holds four patents related to the Cell Matrix architecture; has degrees in electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics; and has recently completed a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech.