Computer science Professors David Whalley and Gary Tyson have received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to design a processor that would enable cell phones and other mobile devices to stay charged longer. The key is to design a more energy-efficient pipelined processor that will cut down on battery use, they say. A pipelined processor can handle various computer processes at once. “The problem is that current techniques used in pipeline designs can waste power by performing redundant and sometimes unnecessary computations,” said Whalley, chair of the Department of Computer Science and principal investigator on the grant. So Whalley, Tyson, and a colleague from the University of Pittsburgh are designing a processor that cuts out most of the redundant computations. Currently, Tyson and Whalley hold one patent in this area and have another patent under review, so the $1.2 million, four-year NSF grant complements those ideas. In addition, Tyson and Whalley have received another NSF grant involving mobile computing. It is a $500,000 three-year grant that supports their research to fight malware and other security threats. To read more, go to http://www.fsu.edu/news/2010/05/25/mobile.devices/