M. Laguna, M. Holgado, B. Santamaría, A. López, M. Maigler, A. Lavín, J. de Vicente, J. Soria, T. Suarez, C. Bardina, M. Jara, F. Sanza, R. Casquel, A. Otón, T. Riesgo
Biophotonic Sensing Cells (BICELLs) are demonstrated to be an efficient technology for label-free biosensing and in concrete for evaluating dry eye diseases. The main advantage of BICELLs is its capability to be used by dropping directly a tear into the sensing surface without the need of complex microfluidics systems. Among this advantage, compact Point of Care read-out device is employed with the capability of evaluating different types of BICELLs packaged on Biochip-Kits that can be fabricated by using different sensing surfaces material. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the combination of three sensing surface materials: (3-Glycidyloxypropyl) trimethoxysilane (GPTMS), SU-8 resist and Nitrocellulose (NC) for two different biomarkers relevant for dry eye diseases: PRDX-5 and ANXA-11.
In this paper, a 64 state soft decision Viterbi Decoder (VD) system by using a high speed radix-4 Add Compare Select (ACS) architecture is presented. The proposed VD system can support different data rate (from 53.5 Mbps to 480 Mbps) for Multiband Orthogonal Frequency-division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) Ultra-Wideband (UWB) system when implemented onto the FPGA board. The proposed VD employs efficient two steps Radix 4 architecture, which is responsible of calculating two steps of 64 state Radix 4 Branch Metrics (BM) within one clock cycle. The branch metrics are calculated using a uniform distance measurement algorithm, which equals to the symbol itself when compared to logic-0 and equal to its one’s complement when compared to logic-1. By employing the modified Modulo Normalization algorithm, it is possible to use only a 10- bit memory block to restore each of the 64 state metrics, with the advantage of avoiding errors caused by overflow during the updating process for state metrics, and simplifying the comparator circuit of the ACS unit. The Two Pointer Even Algorithm, which is considered to be very simple and more hardware-efficient than the register exchange algorithm, is used for tracing back the survivor sequence and output the decoded data stream. 3-bit soft decision input sequences are used for gathering the experimental results. The sampling frequency of the MBOFDM UWB system is 528 MHz, by using the proposed two steps Radix 4 VD architecture we can process 4 input signals in parallel within one clock cycle, therefore only 132 MHz operating frequency is needed for the proposed VD system. This will dramatically reduce the dynamic power consumption for hardware implementation. Final results of the implementation show that the proposed VD architecture can support a maximum working frequency of 152.5 MHz on Xilinx XUPV5-LX110T Evaluation Platform.
KEYWORDS: Sensors, Sensor networks, Distributed computing, Tolerancing, Data processing, Data acquisition, Reliability, Chemical elements, Field programmable gate arrays, Humidity
Collaborative hardening and hardware redundancy are nowadays the most interesting solutions in terms of fault tolerance achieved and low extra cost imposed to the project budget. Thanks to the powerful and cheap digital devices that are available in the market, extra processing capabilities can be used for redundant tasks, not only in early data processing (sensed data) but also in routing and interfacing1
Benefits of dynamic and partial reconfigurable systems are increasingly being more accepted by the industry. For this reason, SRAM-based FPGA manufacturers have improved, or even included for the first time, the support they offer for the design of this kind of systems. However, commercial tools still offer a poor flexibility, which leads to a limited efficiency. This is witnessed by the overhead introduced by the communication primitives, as well as by the inability to relocate reconfigurable modules, among others. For this reason, authors have proposed an academic design tool called DREAMS, which targets the design of dynamically reconfigurable systems. In this paper, main features offered by DREAMS are described, comparing them with existing commercial and academic tools. Moreover, a graphic user interface (GUI) is originally described in this work, with the aim of simplifying the design process, as well as to hide the low level device dependent details to the system designer. The overall goal is to increase the designer productivity. Using the graphic interface, different reconfigurable architectures are provided as design examples. Among them, both conventional slot-based architectures and mesh type designs have been included.
A generic bio-inspired adaptive architecture for image compression suitable to be implemented in embedded
systems is presented. The architecture allows the system to be tuned during its calibration phase. An evolutionary
algorithm is responsible of making the system evolve towards the required performance. A prototype has been
implemented in a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA featuring an adaptive wavelet transform core directed at improving
image compression for specific types of images.
An Evolution Strategy has been chosen as the search algorithm and its typical genetic operators adapted to
allow for a hardware friendly implementation. HW/SW partitioning issues are also considered after a high level
description of the algorithm is profiled which validates the proposed resource allocation in the device fabric.
To check the robustness of the system and its adaptation capabilities, different types of images have been
selected as validation patterns. A direct application of such a system is its deployment in an unknown environment
during design time, letting the calibration phase adjust the system parameters so that it performs efcient image
compression. Also, this prototype implementation may serve as an accelerator for the automatic design of
evolved transform coefficients which are later on synthesized and implemented in a non-adaptive system in the
final implementation device, whether it is a HW or SW based computing device.
The architecture has been built in a modular way so that it can be easily extended to adapt other types of
image processing cores. Details on this pluggable component point of view are also given in the paper.
One of the most computational intensive tasks in recent video encoders and decoders is the deblocking filter. Its
computational complexity is considerable, and it might take more than 30% of the total computational cost of the
decoder execution. Nowadays, some of its limiting factors for reaching real-time capabilities are mainly related with
memory and speed. Trying to deal with these factors, this paper proposes a novel Deblocking filter architecture which
supports all filtering modes available in both the H.264/AVC and Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standards. It has been
implemented in a hardware scalable architecture, which benefits of the parallelism and adaptability of the algorithm and
which can be adapted dynamically in FPGAs.
Regarding to the parallelism, this architecture mapping is capable of respecting data dependencies among MBs while
several functional units (FU) are filtering data in parallel. Regarding scalability, the architecture is flexible enough for
adapting its performance to the diverse environment demands. This fact is possible by increasing or decreasing the
number of FUs, like in a systolic array. In this sense, this paper will present a composition between the FU proposed
against the state-of-the art work.
KEYWORDS: Field programmable gate arrays, Logic, Clocks, Error control coding, Control systems, Embedded systems, Sensor networks, Digital signal processing, Chemical elements, Manufacturing
Modern FPGAs with run-time reconfiguration allow the implementation of complex systems offering both the flexibility
of software-based solutions combined with the performance of hardware. This combination of characteristics, together
with the development of new specific methodologies, make feasible to reach new points of the system design space, and
make embedded systems built on these platforms acquire more and more importance. However, the practical exploitation
of this technique in fields that traditionally have relied on resource restricted embedded systems, is mainly limited by
strict power consumption requirements, the cost and the high dependence of DPR techniques with the specific features of
the device technology underneath.
In this work, we tackle the previously reported problems, designing a reconfigurable platform based on the low-cost and
low-power consuming Spartan-6 FPGA family. The full process to develop the platform will be detailed in the paper
from scratch. In addition, the implementation of the reconfiguration mechanism, including two profiles, is reported. The
first profile is a low-area and low-speed reconfiguration engine based mainly on software functions running on the
embedded processor, while the other one is a hardware version of the same engine, implemented in the FPGA logic. This
reconfiguration hardware block has been originally designed to the Virtex-5 family, and its porting process will be also
described in this work, facing the interoperability problem among different families.
Side Channel Attack (SCA) differs from traditional mathematic attacks. It gets around of the exhaustive mathematic
calculation and precisely pin to certain points in the cryptographic algorithm to reveal confidential information from the
running crypto-devices. Since the introduction of SCA by Paul Kocher et al [1], it has been considered to be one of the
most critical threats to the resource restricted but security demanding applications, such as wireless sensor networks. In
this paper, we focus our work on the SCA-concerned security verification on WSN (wireless sensor network). A detailed
setup of the platform and an analysis of the results of DPA (power attack) and EMA (electromagnetic attack) is
presented. The setup follows the way of low-cost setup to make effective SCAs. Meanwhile, surveying the weaknesses
of WSNs in resisting SCA attacks, especially for the EM attack. Finally, SCA-Prevention suggestions based on
Differential Security Strategy for the FPGA hardware implementation in WSN will be given, helping to get an improved
compromise between security and cost.
KEYWORDS: CMOS technology, Clocks, Binary data, Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, Algorithm development, Signal processing, Control systems, Signal to noise ratio, Quantum efficiency, Wireless communications
This paper presents a low-power, high-speed 4-data-path 128-point mixed-radix (radix-2 & radix-22) FFT processor for
MB-OFDM Ultra-WideBand (UWB) systems. The processor employs the single-path delay feedback (SDF) pipelined
structure for the proposed algorithm, it uses substructure-sharing multiplication units and shift-add structure other than
traditional complex multipliers. Furthermore, the word lengths are properly chosen, thus the hardware costs and power
consumption of the proposed FFT processor are efficiently reduced. The proposed FFT processor is verified and
synthesized by using 0.13 μm CMOS technology with a supply voltage of 1.32 V. The implementation results indicate
that the proposed 128-point mixed-radix FFT architecture supports a throughput rate of 1Gsample/s with lower power
consumption in comparison to existing 128-point FFT architectures.
KEYWORDS: Network on a chip, Multimedia, Telecommunications, Networks, Video processing, System on a chip, Process modeling, Digital signal processing, Modeling, Video
In this paper a topological analysis of different IP distributions focusing on optimal memory placements in regular 2DMeshes
has been performed. As case study, a real MPEG-4 decoder implementation with three memories was chosen. In
order to study the influence of memories in the topology of the network, Arteris NoCexplorer tool was used. The results
inferred from the experiments show how the performance of a multimedia system can be improved if memories are
properly located within a NoC. Furthermore, the present work serves to validate the use of Arteris NoCexplorer for
simulating and modelling complex NoC based designs. In addition, a methodology for determining the best IP
distribution in terms of latency and throughput is presented and its feasibility is demonstrated.
KEYWORDS: Object recognition, Field programmable gate arrays, Neural networks, Computer architecture, Very large scale integration, Current controlled current source, Pattern recognition, Network security, Control systems, Network architectures
Neural networks, widely used in pattern recognition, security applications and robot control have been chosen for the task of object recognition within this system. One of the main drawbacks of the implementation of traditional neural networks in reconfigurable hardware is the huge resource consuming demand. This is due not only to their intrinsic parallelism, but also to the traditional big networks designed. However, modern FPGA architectures are perfectly suited for this kind of massive parallel computational needs. Therefore, our proposal is the implementation of Tiny Neural Networks, TNN -self-coined term-, in reconfigurable architectures. One of most important features of TNNs is their learning ability. Therefore, what we show here is the attempt to rise the autonomy features of the system, triggering a new learning phase, at run-time, when necessary. In this way, autonomous adaptation of the system is achieved. The system performs shape identification by the interpretation of object singularities. This is achieved by interconnecting several specialized TNN that work cooperatively. In order to validate the research, the system has been implemented and configured as a perceptron-like TNN with backpropagation learning and applied to the recognition of shapes. Simulation results show that this architecture has significant performance benefits.
KEYWORDS: Field programmable gate arrays, Profiling, Control systems, Detection and tracking algorithms, Multimedia, Sensors, Telecommunications, Clocks, Logic, Video
In this paper we propose a method for run time profiling of applications on instruction level by analysis of loops. Instead
of looking for coarse grain blocks we concentrate on fine grain but still costly blocks in terms of execution times. Most
code profiling is done in software by introducing code into the application under profile witch has time overhead, while
in this work data for the position of a loop, loop body, size and number of executions is stored and analysed using a
small non intrusive hardware block. The paper describes the system mapping to runtime reconfigurable systems. The fine
grain code detector block synthesis results and its functionality verification are also presented in the paper. To
demonstrate the concept MediaBench multimedia benchmark running on the chosen development platform is used.
In this paper, we present a high-level power macromodeling technique at register transfer level (RTL). The proposed
methodology allows to estimate the power dissipation on digital systems composed of intellectual property (IP) macro-blocks
by using the statistical knowledge of their primary inputs. During the power estimation procedure, the sequence of
an input stream is generated by using input metrics. Then, a Monte Carlo zero delay simulation is performed and a power
dissipation macromodel function is built from power dissipation results. From then on, this macromodel function can be
used to estimate power dissipation of the system just by using the statistics of the IPs primary inputs. In our experiments
with the test IP system, the average error is 29.63%.
KEYWORDS: Sensors, Transducers, Sensor networks, Actuators, Field programmable gate arrays, Analog electronics, Clocks, Rapid manufacturing, Signal processing, Temperature sensors
Sensor networks have reached a great relevance during the last years. The idea is to use a large number of nodes measuring different physical parameters in several environments, which implies different research challenges (low power consumption, communication protocols, platform hardware design, etc). There is a tendency to use modular hardware nodes in order to make easier rapid prototyping as well as to be able to redesign faster and reuse part of the hardware modules. One of the main obstacles for rapid prototyping is that sensors present heterogeneous interfaces. In this paper, a VHDL library for sensors/actuators interfaces is proposed. The purpose is to have a set of different sensor interfaces that include the most common in the sensors/actuators world, enabling the rapid connection to a new sensor/actuator. Moreover, the concept presented here may be used for new interfaces that can be easily developed. The VHDL implementation is independent of the final platform (any FPGA or ASIC) in order to minimize redesign effort and make easier rapid prototyping. The interfaces are installed in a UPM platform for sensor networks.
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