Research Focus
Larry Crum's research and engineering practice interests are centered in real-time embedded computer systems and digital design. His professional experience is in control and automation in navigation, industrial production, and embedded controller and communication systems. Current interest includes several focused areas:
- Networks of "sensors" termed motes, smart dust, senor webs, . . . have potential application in problems that require a large number of distributed sensors, contollers, or collaborators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_dust). Berkeley, among other leading universities, have active research programs and laboratories that support mote research (http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/, http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/). Products to support application are beginning to evolve (http://www.xbow.com/Products/Wireless_Sensor_Networks.htm, http://www.dustnetworks.com/flash-index.shtml). Motes have interesting and unique operating system requirements. TinyOS is emerging as "standard" OS for motes (http://www.tinyos.net/), and TinyDB is a possible data base tool (http://telegraph.cs.berkeley.edu/tinydb/). There are a wide variety of interesting and fun theoretical studies and application oriented projects that could be pursued using motes.
- Digital circuit design continues to evolve as chips get smaller and more sophistocated, and as new design components, tools, and techniques become available and practical to utilize. We need to develop laboratory facilities at UWT to provide educational and research support in digital design. We have chips, prototype boards, some test equipment, and simple programmable devices. We need to develop this further. This provides some good projects for learning and should lead to some interesting and fun research projects. Industrial leaders in FPGA's (Flash based Programmable Gate Arrays), CPLD's (Complex Programmable Logic Devices), and Structured ASIC's (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and the support hardware and software are Xilinx (http://www.xilinx.com/) and Altera (http://www.altera.com/).