May 26, 2010
School of Engineering, Amritapuri
 

Br. Rajesh Kannan’s students continue to be invited to present research papers at major conferences around the world.
 

Three groups of students will have the opportunity to travel to Singapore to present their work at the International Conference of Mechanical and Electrical Technology in September 2010.
 

“All three papers resulted from final-year BTech projects,” stated Br. Rajesh.
 

The papers are listed below.
 

Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Prasanth Krishna, Pratheesh Somarajan, Vishnu A. Pillai, Reswan Ul Hakkim, Extraction of License Plate Region in Automatic License Plate Recognition
 

Rajesh Kannan Megalingam , Gayathri Gopakumar, Jyothi K Sasidharan, Anju Ajit and Deepthi Luke, A VLSI Implementation and Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms for Security and Privacy in Communication Networks
 

Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Ashwin Mohan, Shekhil Hassan Thavalengal, Tanmay Muralidhar Rao, Vivek Periye, Low Power Single Core CPU for a Dual Core Microcontroller
 

The papers will be listed in IEEE Xplore and indexed by both EI (Compendex) and ISI Proceedings (ISTP).
We asked one group of students to describe the work undertaken. They enthusiastically shared details of their research.
 

“We ran a Dual Core Microcontroller (two computers on a single chip) using a low-power Single Core CPU,” they explained. “Our main aim was to save power. Microcontrollers are used in many electronic devices such as a refrigerators, TVs and iron boxes that are regularly used in most homes.”
 

“When people buy an electronic device, they place more emphasis on its cost and running speed. They select devices that are cheap and those that run with a high speed. But they forget that most of these devices consume a lot of power, resulting in high electricity bills.”
 

“Our research was conducted to investigate how microcontrollers could run on low power and consume less electricity, and at the same time, ensure the performance/efficiency of the system at a comparable speed and affordable prices.”
 

How was the reduction in power consumption obtained?
 

“By various methods. We gated clock signals for a period of time, when components such as registers and flip-flops did not need to work. Due to this, components could be disabled without affecting the working of the circuit and a lot of power was saved.”
 

“We also tested devices at various voltage levels to check for the minimum voltage required at which the system could function. This voltage scaling can also help reduce power consumption.”
 

“Finally, we also tried serialization of the data bus. Serialisation refers to the transfer of one bit of data at a time.”
 

This group of students was preceded by several other students groups who also studied the problem of enabling CPU function on low power. Earlier student groups have presented their research at the International Conference of Computer Science and Information Technology (August 2009, Beijing, China), International Conference of Parallel Processing (September 2009, Vienna, Austria) and International Conference and Workshop on Emerging Trends in Technology (March 2010, Mumbai).