Mazen A. R. Saghir


[Me]

Welcome to my home page!

I am a Ph.D. graduate (November 1998) from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. My research was supervised by Professor Paul Chow, and my research interests include processor architectures, HLL compilers, and CAD tools for embedded DSP applications.

I also received my M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto (June 1993), and my B.Eng. in Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) (December 1989).


How to Contact Me

Mazen A. R. Saghir
c/o Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University
of Toronto
10 King's College Road
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4

E-Mail: saghir@eecg.toronto.edu
URL: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~saghir/

Mazen A. R. Saghir

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

American University of Beirut

P.O. Box 11-0236

Riad El-Solh / Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon

 

E-Mail: mazen@aub.edu.lb

URL: http://www.aub.edu.lb/~mazen/

 


Research

My research is in the area of computer architecture and optimizing compilers for programmable digital signal processors (DSPs).

DSPs are specialized microprocessors designed to process streams of digitized signals such as speech or video. Because processing such signals is computationally intensive and must often be done in real time, DSPs are designed to provide high computational performance. Moreover, since DSPs are often embedded in high-volume products, they are also designed to minimize overall system costs. Because they offer high performance at low costs, DSPs are extensively used in such areas as telecommunications, multimedia, instrumentation, and control.

To meet the demands for high performance and low costs, DSPs are highly integrated devices that commonly pack an ALU core, several memory banks, and I/O devices in a small die area. Architecturally, DSPs are typically designed around a fast multiplier and an accumulator-based data path. Moreover, they make use of very few registers, use multiple data memory banks, use specialized addressing modes (e.g. modulo and bit-reversed addressing), and have tightly-encoded machine instructions that execute multiple operations in parallel. As a result, DSPs are difficult targets for High-Level Language (HLL) compilers, and application programmers must still develop their applications in assembly language to ensure their code meets its performance and storage requirements.

To be continued...


Dissertation

My dissertation is entitled: "Application-Specific Instruction-Set Architectures for Embedded DSP Applications." Here is the abstract.


Publications


Personal

  • My Résumé. An HTML version of my résumé.
  • Biography. Everything you ever wanted to know about me, but were afraid to ask!

This page has been accessed times since June 10, 1997.