NanoWatt Design Completes Phase I of NSF Grant

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — NanoWatt Design Inc. recently completed Phase I of a National Science Foundation grant awarded in 2013.

NanoWatt Design is a portfolio company of VIC Technology Venture Development, a privately held firm based at the Innovation Center in the Arkansas Research and Technology Park. The University of Arkansas Technology Development Foundation manages the park.

The $150,000 NSF grant came through the Small Business Innovation Research Program, which allows federal agencies to stimulate technological innovation in the private sector by strengthening small businesses that meet federal research and development needs. The program also is intended to increase the commercial application of federally supported research results.

The grant supported the company’s ongoing efforts to develop and commercialize asynchronous integrated circuit technologies that promise better ways to manage battery life and heat dissipation in electronic devices.

The Phase I project concentrated on proving NanoWatt Design’s solutions in a multi-core, image processor design. Efforts are targeted at the rapidly growing demand for image processing associated with wearable computers. For example, heads-up displays allow projected information supplied by a computer to be viewed on a transparent display by an observer —a pilot, for example — without having to alter his angle of vision.

Heads-up displays expend a large amount of energy in acquiring images that might be sent by Bluetooth from a camera or a user’s cell phone, then displaying these images on special optical surfaces. Each of these applications rely on computation-intensive image processing, and several processor cores are needed to keep pace. Reducing energy consumption is critical for battery life, but eliminating heat is also a concern for user comfort.

During the Phase I project, an aerospace company partnered with NanoWatt Design to provide access to the design details of their 16-core processor used in the company’s research. It was shown that NanoWatt Design’s proprietary solutions reduce energy per core by 27 percent for the already efficient image processor studied.

NanoWatt Design anticipates beginning a Phase II project in July of this year. This project will be concentrated on refining the multi-core processor and developing software to allow such processors to be rapidly customized for different image processing applications, such as HUDs and night vision goggles.

NanoWatt Design currently has three issued patents, five patents pending, and plans to file two additional patents based on inventions that arose during the Phase I project.