Abstract
The paper describes a system level design approach to the wearable computers project at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The project is an unique example of a cross-disciplinary effort, drawing students from mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and industrial design. Over the last six and half years that the course has been taught, teams of undergraduate and graduate students have designed and fabricated sixteen new generations of wearable computers, using an evolving artifact-specific, multidisciplinary design methodology. The complexity of their architectures has increased by a factor of over 200, and the complexity of the application has also increased significantly. We introduce a metric to compare wearable computers and show that their performances have increased by several orders of magnitude. A system-level approach to power/performance optimization is going to be a crucial catalyst for making wearable computers an everyday tool for the general public.
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Smailagic, A., Siewiorek, D. System Level Design as Applied to CMU Wearable Computers. The Journal of VLSI Signal Processing-Systems for Signal, Image, and Video Technology 21, 251–263 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008131106610
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008131106610