News & Notes: Intel awards researchers $1.3 million

Princeton is represented on the team by electrical engineering professor Sharad Malik, who is also the acting director of the Program in Information Technology and Society and the director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

The goal of our project is to create new technology that can bolster the reliability of firmware,” Oxford computer scientist Daniel Kroening, the principal investigator of the project, said in a statement released by Rice. “Chipmakers are reaching the limit with the current technology they use to create firmware and ensure that it’s error-free. Our task is to come up with new ideas that the industry can carry forward.”

Firmware is responsible for operations such as increasing processing speed and capacity when a device is faced with a high level of functioning and for reducing capabilities when the device is idle to save battery life. The tools created by the team will improve operations and facilitate testing, and the team plans to share any results with the open-source community.