Today’s computer systems develop towards less energy consumption while keeping high performance. These are contradictory requirement and pose a great challenge. A good example of an application were this is used is the smartphone. The constraints are on long battery time while getting high performance required by future 2D/3D applications. A solution to this is heterogeneous systems that have components that are specialized in different tasks and can execute them fast with low energy consumption. These could be specialized i.e. encoding/decoding, encryption/decryption, image processing or communication. At the apartment of Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing Laboratory (CAPPL) at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) a vector co-processor has been developed. The Vector co-processor has the unusual feature of being able to receive instructions from multiple hosts (scalar cores). In addition to this a test system with a couple of scalar processors using the vector processor has been developed. This thesis describes this processor and its test system. It also shows the development of math applications involving matrix operations. This results in the conclusions of the vector co-processing saving substantial amount of energy while speeding up the execution of the applications. In addition to this the thesis will describe an extension of the vector co-processor design that makes it possible to monitor the throughput of instructions and data in the processor.

The use of full wave electromagnetic modeling and simulation tools allows for accurate performance predictions of unique RF structures that exhibit multi-dimensional scales. Full wave simulation tools need to cover the broad range of frequency including RF and terahertz bands that is focused as RF technology is developed. In this dissertation, three structures with multi-dimensional scales and different operating frequency ranges are modeled and simulated. The first structure involves nanostructured solar cells. The silicon solar cell design is interesting research to cover terahertz frequency range in terms of the economic and environmental aspects. Two unique solar cell surfaces, nanowire and branched nanowire are modeled and simulated. The surface of nanowire is modeled with two full wave simulators and the results are well-matched to the reference results. This dissertation compares and contrasts the simulators and their suitability for extensive simulation studies. Nanostructured Si cells have large and small dimensional scales and the material characteristics of Si change rapidly over the solar spectrum. The second structure is a reconfigurable four element antenna array antenna operating at 60 GHz for wireless communications between computing cores in high performance computing systems. The array is reconfigurable, provides improved transmission gain between cores, and can be used to create a more failure resilient computing system. The on-chip antenna array involves modeling the design of a specially designed ground plane that acts as an artificial magnetic conductor. The work involves modeling antennas in a complex computing environment. The third structure is a unique collar integrated zig-zag antenna that operates at 154.5 MHz for use as a ground link in a GPS based location system for wildlife tracking. In this problem, an intricate antenna is modeled in the proximity of an animal. Besides placing a low frequency antenna in a constricted area (the collar), the antenna performance near the large animal body must also be considered. Each of these applications requires special modeling details to take into account the various dimensional scales of the structures and interaction with complex media. An analysis of the challenges and limits of each specific problem will be presented.