School of Engineering
(until August 2017 with School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering)
(in August 2002 moved from Department of Computing Science)
Newcastle University

Alex Yakovlev

Professor of Computing System Design
Telephone: +44-191-208-8184 Fax: +44-191-208-8180
Email: Alex.Yakovlev at newcastle.ac.uk
Mail: School of Engineering, Merz Court ,
Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, NE1 7RU.

Office: Room E4.13, Merz Court

Asynchronous Research Group at Newcastle (async.org.uk)


Newcastle Async Group's Technical Report Series (async.org.uk/tr.html)


I am head of Microsystems Research Group

Research Interests

My blog on Energy-Modulated computing link


Access to Workcraft tools


My scientific genealogy here


My PhD alumni (up to March 2024) here


Building a Common Vision for the UK Microelectronic Design Research Community

Steve Furber's collection of Vision Statements (November 2004)
Statement "Soft Time in hARd Space (STARS), or mapping designs with blocks cut loose" , by A. Yakovlev and A. Bystrov
"From Low Power Computing to Power-Adaptive Computing" (A. Yakovlev), talk given at the Electronics Knowledge Transfer Network event "The Grand Challenges in Microelectronics Design - uGC1 Batteries Not Included" held in Southampton on 16 July 2008, sponsored by NXP Semiconductors. More information about Grand Challenges in MSD is available here

Publications

The full list is here

My DSc thesis, based on the Collection of Works submitted in August 2005 and put for Award of
Doctor of Science in Engineering by the Newcastle University SAgE Faculty passlist of 17.08.06, is here

My PhD thesis, defended on on 5th November 1982, in Russian (degree "Candidate of Engineering Sciences")
here

Some of my 'relatively early' papers in English:

Curriculum Vitae

The full CV (for promotion to Personal Chair in 1999) here

My "Trilogy about Victor Ilyich Varshavsky" (in Russian) (doc) , and (pdf) . Victor Varshavsky (1933-2005) was my PhD advisor and mentor for many years. More about Victor Varshavsky as a scientist, engineer, and man can be found: here and here (in Russian)

On this photo Victor Varshavsky re-unites with his former group members (left-to-right: Alex Kondratyev, Alexander Taubin, Mike Kishinevsky, Victor Varshavsky, Alex and Masha Yakovlev) during the Async'00 Symposium (March 2000) in Eilat.


A paper summarising my involvement in "asynchronous" research during the period of 1992-2002 Clockless computing or learning how to play "soft time" in "hard space" (to appear in a 2003 special issue of Izvestia LETI (Proceedings of the St.Petersburg Electrotechnical University) dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Professor V.I. Timokhin).

Jobs and studentships in the Newcastle VLSI Design group

Currently, nothing is available. However, enquiries are always welcome.

NEW Research Projects

Traces of Research Activity

I am Principal Investigator on EPSRC-funded projects:
RelCel , HOLISTIC , SURE , STEP , SEDATE (in collaboration with Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh - see main SEDATE website at Manchester), SYRINGE , NEGUS , SCREEN , STELLA , BESST , COHERENT , HADES, TIMBRE, COMFORT (see also COMFORT home page), MOVIE (see also MOVIE home page) ASTI (visiting fellowships of Prof. Alex Kondratyev and Prof. Luciano Lavagno), and BREACH (visiting fellowship of Dr. Nikolai Starodoubtsev from Russian Academy of Science, to work on Behavioural REfinements for Asynchronous Circuit syntHesis);
two British Council -funded joint projects, a Acciones Integradas (Part 2) project with Prof. Jordi Cortadella's group at Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, and an ARC project with Prof. Monika Heiner's group at Brandenburg Technical University at Cottbus, Germany;
and participate in ESPRIT-funded projects DEVA and ACID-WG

(see also Asynchronous Research at Newcastle )

2010:

Jens Sparsoe, Pascal Vivet, Yvain Thonnart and I gave a tutorial "Asynchronous Logic and GALS Design: Principles and State-of-the-Art" at DATE 2010 , held in Dresden in March 2010.

My keynote talk at IEEE International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems (DDECS'10), held in Vienna April 14-16, 2010 - "Asynchronous Design, Quo Vadis?"

My invited talk at Power Management Technologies conference held at National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, on 27th May 2010 "Power Adaptive Computing" (print version on white background is here )

In the past:

1998:

I have organised Workshop on Hardware Design and Petri Nets within the 19th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets Lisbon, Portugal, June 1998

I have co-organised a Special Interest Workshop on Exploitation of STG-based Design Technology (announcement and report) at St. Petersburg, Russia, 6-7 July 1998

Last ASTI project meeting (aka ACiD-WG special interest group meeting) with Luciano Lavagno and Alex Kondratyev has been held at Newcastle in the period of 20 Jul-5 Aug.

Our project ASAP (Automated Synthesis of Parallel and Asynchronous Controllers, EPSRC Research Grant GR/J52327) has been graded as follows:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 5 (top)
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)
ASAP publication list

Our long (and long-awaited!) overview paper in the recent Advanced Course on Petri nets :

A.V. Yakovlev and A.M. Koelmans
Petri nets and Digital Hardware Design
Lectures on Petri Nets II: Applications
Advances in Petri Nets, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1492.
Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 154-236.


We would be happy if it proved useful to anyone exploring the exciting area of HW+PN.

1999:

I have co-organised the Second Workshop on Hardware Design and Petri Nets within the 20th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, June 1999

I have co-organised the Third ACiD-WG Workshop , held on 18-19 January, 1999 in Newcastle.

I have served as a co-chair of the Programme Committee of ASYNC'99 to be held in Barcelona in April '99.

I have organised the Seventh Asynchronous UK Forum to be held in Newcastle, 20-21 December 1999

Our ASTI Project (Asynchronous circuit Synthesis and TestIng, EPSRC Research Grant GR/L24038,
visiting fellowships of Prof. Alex Kondratyev and Prof. Luciano Lavagno), has been graded as follows:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 5 (top)
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)

2000:

Our presentation at the ACiD-WG workshiop in Grenoble, January 2000 was about the perspectives of using direct translation techniques in synthesis of asynchronous controllers from Petri net specifications. Here are powerpoint and ps files

I have co-edited a book on Hardware Design and Petri Nets for Kluwer AP, based on the collection of papers presented at the HWPN workshops. The book has been published in March 2000. Hardware Design and Petri Nets (about the book)
Ordering the book from Kluwer AP

Our projects HADES (Hazard-free Arbiter DESign, EPSRC Research Grant GR/K70175)
and TIMBRE (TIMe-predicatBle hardwaRE platforms for real-time systems, EPSRC Research Grant GR/L28098)
have been respectively graded as follows:
HADES:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 5 (top)
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)
TIMBRE:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 4
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)

Our first silicon, the result of the HADES and COMFORT has been received from EUROPRACTICE on 9 June. The first photos are here

I have co-organised (with Jordi Cortadella and Luciano Lavagno) Advanced Tutorial on Hardware Design and Petri nets , held on 26 June, 2000 in Aarhus, Denmark within the 21st Int. Conf. On Appl. and Theory of Petri Nets (PN'2000)
The workshop materials are available from the PN2000 conference site:
Download: PDF (1.5 MB)
Download Addendum: PDF (724 Kb)

I have co-organised the AINT'2000 Workshop (Two-day workshop on Asynchronous Interfaces: Tools, Techniques, and Implementations) to be held in Delft, The Netherlands, 19-20 July 2000

My tutorial "Specifying Controllers using Petri Nets" at the 9th Async UK Forum was kindly given by Luciano Lavagno. The tutorial examples handout: gzipped postscript.

2001:

My talk "Communicating in Heterogeneously Timed Systems" (abstract) at the ICSA Colloquium in Edinburgh:
Slides in Powerpoint(1MB),
Handouts gzipped postscript(500KB)

I have co-organised (with Maciej Koutny, Albert Koelmans and Jason Steggles) a dual conference in Newcastle on 25-29 June 2001: 22nd Int. Conf. on Appl. and Theory of Petri nets and 2nd Int. Conf. on Appl. of Concurrency to System Design , and acted as a programme co-chair on the latter.

Papers presented at the 11th UK Async. Forum in Cambridge : tarred and gzipped

2002:

Tutorial "Logic Design of Asynchronous Circuits" by J.Cortadella, J. Garside and A. Yakovlev at ASPDAC/VLSI Design 2002 zipped (PPT and PS) files, including 'readme.txt'

Talk at the 2nd EC Framework 5 workshop in Munich (28 Jan 2002): "Behavioural synthesis of asynchronous controllers: a case study with a self-timed communication channel" (Powerpoint)

Monograph Logic Synthesis of Asynchronous Controllers and Interfaces by J. Cortadella, M. Kishinevsky, A. Kondrateyv, L. Lavagno and A. Yakovlev, has appeared from Springer in March 2002, ISBN3-540-43152-7.

Maciej Koutny and I have organised NATURAL COMPUTING DAYS AT NEWCASTLE on March 4-5, 2002.

Some publicity of our group's research (with certain technical inacurracies - bless the media!):
in TechExtreme ,
in Yahoo News ,
in Russian SciTechlibrary (and *almost* the same in Russian - please excuse someone's `wonderful' translation!),
in Suddeutche Zeitung
An article in Times Higher Education Supplement "Clock-free technology developed", THES, 26 April 2002 (p6) ( here )
Spiegel Online
KLIK Magazin
Perm' State University (in Russian)
British Trade (by Paul Shepherd)
Space Daily

My invited lecture "Is the Die Cast for the Token Game" (with contributions from Frank Burns, Alex Bystrov, Delong Shang and Danil Sokolov) was presented at 23rd Int. Conf. on Applications and Theory of Petri nets, Adelaide, Powerpoint slides
The full conference proceedings can be found here

The Petrify group has been selected as a finalist in the prestigeous Descartes Prize 2002 competition: Press Release
and Prize Catalogue
and Our diploma

Jordi Cortadella, Grzegorz Rozenberg and I edited the book "Advances in Petri Nets: Concurrency and Hardware Design", Springer, November 2002
The volume is also available online here

2003:

Materials for my tutorial and demo at ASYNC'03 (Vancouver) "Petrify: Method and Tool for Synthesis of Asynchronous Controllers and Interfaces": Slides ppt and pdf , and Exercise manual (pdf)
As a Chair of the Steering Committee I attended the Third International Conference on Application of Concurrency in System Design (ACSD'03) held in Guimaraes, Portugal, on 18-20 June 2003.
Materials for my lectures "Hardware Design and Petri Nets" at the Advanced Course on Petri nets (Eichstaett, Germany, Sept. 2003) are here: Handouts (pdf)

2004:

Jordi Cortadella and I organised the first International Workshop on Token-Based Computing (ToBaCo'04), which took place in June, in Bologna within 25th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets (ICATPN'04)


As a Chair of the Steering Committee I attended the Fourth International Conference on Application of Concurrency in System Design (ACSD'04) held in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on 16-18 June 2004.

I gave an invited talk "Ten years of Petrifying" at the Fourth ACiD-WG Workshop in Turku, Finland, 28-29 June.

At this workshop I also gave a talk "Phase-difference based logic: principle and applications" , which introduced a new class of logic circuits, with the interesting property of "data-invariance" (the switching activity of the circuit is independent of the processed data), which may have useful applications in security, testing and quantum circuits (with decoherence).

I gave a talk Asynchronous Communication and Self-Timed Systems: Can they help simulate Brain? at the University Seminar "Brain-like Machines", Research Beehive, 11 Novewber 2004.

2005

I gave a day of lectures and tutorials at the ACiD-WG Winter School on Timing for Deep Submicron Chips , held in Cambridge on 3-7 January 2005.

My father Vladimir Yakovlev (Emeritus Professor of Control at the St. Petersburg Electrical Engineering University (also known as LETI)), Dr. Ivan Tyukin (graduate from LETI and research fellow at RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan)) and I visited Imperial College, EEE Department, in April 2004 on the invitation of Professor Peter Cheung. Here we are standing next to Denis Gabor .


I gave a talk Battling Complexity and Uncertainty via Asynchronous System Design at the UK Design Forum 2005, Manchester, 13-14 April 2005.


I gave an Advanced tutorial "Hardware Design and Petri nets" at the 26th International Conference On Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency, Miami, USA, June 2005.


2006:

Ran Ginosar, Pol Marchal and I have organised the DATE'06 Friday Workshop "Future Interconnects and Networks on Chip", which took place under the auspices of DATE'06 in Munich. The details and presentations (talks and poster abstracts) are here


I served as a co-chair (with Jens Sparsoe) of the Programme Committee of ASYNC'06 held in Grenoble in March 2006.


Together with Maciej Koutny we visited Xidian University in Xi'an and Institute of Electronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing with lectures on "Concurrency Models for Digital Systems Design" and "Some Aspects of Designing Systems on Chip". Some details are on the Xidian University website


I gave an invited talk "Coping with concurrency in hardware: teaching experiences" at the Workshop on Teaching Concurrency (TeaConc'06), held within ACSD'06 and ICATPN'06 in Turku, Finland, June 2006. ( talk abstract ).

Useful research links and docs

Teaching Activities in 2007/08

TEMPUS/TACIS Activities:

A collaborative TACIS/TEMPUS project with Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University (KRSU) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Administrative Duties in 2001/02


Misc useful links

Mathematics and Theoretical CS:
American Mathematical Monthly
Topics in Mathematics
AMS (American Mathematical Society)
Math - General Resources
Theoretical CS database
SIGACT News Theory Calendar
The Hamiltonian Page
Planar Graphs
Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics
Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles
Conway's "Life" Miscellany
Internet Resources for the College Math Student
Algorithms
Collected Algorithms of the ACM
The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository
Scott Gasch's Algorithm Archive
Geometry in Action: discrete and computational geometry
A Survey of Global Optimization Methods (Gray et al)
The Geometry Center
VLSI
EE Times Network
VLSIhoo
IBM Microelectronics
Yield and Reliability in VLSI
Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present
CPU Info Center
Research on Energy Aware Computing using Probabilistic Semiconductor Devices at Goergia Tech
Hardware Verification
Automated Theorem Proving (by Geoff Sutcliffe)
MATLAB:
MATLAB Tips and Previews
MATLAB at MathWorks

E-mail

alex.yakovlev at ncl.ac.uk

Telephone numbers

Voice: +44-191-222-8184
Fax: +44-191-222-8180

Mailing address

School of EECE, Merz Court,
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
United Kingdom

Geographical location

Room E4.13, Merz Court,
Newcastle University