Michael Aitken

B.Sc. (Electrical and Computer Engineering) (First Class Hons.), UCT

Biography

I am a student at UCT currently completing my MSc in Electrical Engineering. I am working at Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Rosebank, Cape Town, as a member of the ACE (Advanced Computer Engineering) research group.

Undergraduate Research Topic

“An FPGA-Based Data Acquisition System for Ultrasound Tomography”

This thesis sets out to investigate the recent developments in FPGA technology, looking specifically at the benefits that FPGAs deliver to embedded system design. It then moves on to suggest a software/hardware configuration that will provide a cheap, fast-tracked working demonstration of an ultrasound tomography system. It takes the reader through the process of building the entire system:

· designing and implementing the external hardware

· creating a customized soft-core processor

· interfacing all the system components

· writing the control code

· testing the system

· demonstrating valid results

For more information please see my undergraduate thesis.

Masters Research Topic:

“A HyperTransport Reconfigurable Accelerator Card”

This thesis topic entails the investigation into, the design, the implementation, and the testing of a reconfigurable accelerator card to be used in high performance computing. This accelerator card will harness the power of the latest Xilinx Virtex5 FPGAs for the purposes of high performance reconfigurable computing. The card will be the platform for future research in the field of reconfigurable computing.

For more information please view my project poster

Contact Details:

Email: mike_dot_aitken@gmail_dot_com (replace “_dot_” with “.”)

CellPhone: +27 72_noads_2239650 (remove “_noads_”)

Last Updated: 18/02/2007