Challenges for embedded systems development: can we have it all?

24 março 2014, 15:16 - Lucília Abreu

Abstract
In this talk we discuss the current design challenges for embedded systems, suffering pressures from the market, technology and software development. After discussing the context, we introduce some first steps in the direction of having software productivity with high reliability and low energy dissipation. We present RA3, the Resilient Adaptive Algebraic Architecture, which is capable of adapting parallelism exploitation in a time-deterministic fashion to reduce power consumption, while meeting the existing real-time deadlines. Furthermore, the architecture provides low overhead error correction capabilities, through the use of algebraic properties of the operations it performs. We use two real-time industrial case studies to validate the architecture and to show how the adaptive exploitation works. Finally, we present the results of fault-injection campaigns to show the architecture resilience against soft-errors.

Luigi Carro was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1962. He received the Electrical Engineering and the MSc degrees from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, in 1985 and 1989, respectively. rom 1989 to 1991 he worked at ST-Microelectronics, Agrate, Italy, in the R&D group. In 1996 he received the Dr. degree in the area of Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS),Brazil. He is presently a full professor at the Applied Informatics Department at the Informatics Institute of UFRGS, in charge of Computer Architecture and Organization courses at the undergraduate levels. He is also a member of the Graduation Program in Computer Science at UFRGS, where he is co-responsible for courses on Embedded Systems, Digital signal Processing, and VLSI Design. His primary research interests include embedded systems design, validation, automation and test, fault tolerance for future technologies and rapid system prototyping. He has advised more than 20 graduate students, and has published more than 150 technical papers on those topics. He has authored the book Digital systems Design and Prototyping (2001-in Portuguese) and is the co-author of Fault-Tolerance Techniques for SRAM-based FPGAs (2006-Springer), Dynamic Reconfigurable Architectures and Transparent optimization Techniques (2010-Springer) and Adaptive Systems (Springer 2012). In 2007 he received the prize FAPERGS - Researcher of the year in Computer Science. His most updated resume is located in http://lattes.cnpq.br/8544491643812450. For the latest news, please check www.inf.ufrgs.br/~carro