The Fuzzy Integrated Evaluation of Embedded System Security

Nowadays, embedded systems are central to modern life, mainly due to the scientific and technological advances of the last decades that started a new reality in which the embedded systems market has been growing steadily, along with a monthly or even weekly emergence of new products with different applications across several domains. This embedded system ubiquity was the drive for the following question "Why should we focus on embedded systems design?" that was answered in [1, 2] with the following points: (1) high and fast penetration in products and services due to the integration of networking, operating system and database capabilities, (2) very strategic field economically and (3) a new and relatively undefined subject in academic environment. Other adjacent questions have been raised such as "Why is the design of embedded systems special? ". The answer for this last question is based mainly on several problems raised by the new technologies, such as the need for more human resources in specialized areas and high learning curve for system designers. As pointed in [1], these problems can prevent many companies from adopting these new technologies or force them not to respond timely in mastering these technological and market challenges. In this paper, it is described how staff at ESRG-UMinho and ISE-AIT faced the embedded systems challenges at several levels. It starts to describe the development of the educational context for the new technologies and show how our Integrated Master Curriculum in Industrial Electronics and Computer Engineering has been adapted to satisfy the needs of the major university customers, the industry.

From the Publisher: Models in System Design tracks the general trend in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. System design is by nature combined with prototyping, mixed domain design, and verification, and it is no surprise that today's modeling & models are used in various levels of system design and verification. In order to deal with constraints induced by volume and complexity, new methods and techniques have been defined. Models in System Design provides an overview of the latest modeling techniques for use by system designers. Models in System Design will help designers and researchers to understand these latest techniques in system design and as such will be of interest to all involved in embedded system design.

The steady increase in complexity of high-end embedded systems goes along with an increasingly complex design process. We are currently still in a transition phase from Hardware-Description Language (HDL) based design towards virtual-platform-based design of embedded systems. As design complexity rises faster than developer productivity a gap forms. Restoring productivity while at the same time managing increased design complexity can also be achieved through focussing on the development of new tools and design methodologies. In most application areas, high-level modelling languages such as SystemC are used in early design phases. In modern software development Continuous Integration (CI) is used to automatically test if a submitted piece of code breaks functionality. Application of the CI concept to embedded system design and testing requires fast build and test execution times from the virtual platform framework. For this use case the ability to save a specific state of a virtual platform becomes necessary. The saving and restoring of specific states of a simulation requires the ability to serialize all data structures within the simulation models. Improving the frameworks and establishing better methods will only help to narrow the design gap, if these changes are introduced with the needs of the engineers and developers in mind. Ultimately, it is their productivity that shall be improved. The ability to save the state of a virtual platform enables developers to run longer test campaigns that can even contain randomized test stimuli. If the saved states are modifiable the developers can inject faulty states into the simulation models. This work contributes an extension to the SoCRocket virtual platform framework to enable snapshotting. The snapshotting extension can be considered a reference implementation as the utilization of current SystemC/TLM standards makes it compatible to other frameworkds. Furthermore, integrating the UVM SystemC library into the framework enables test driven development and fast validation of SystemC/TLM models using snapshots. These extensions narrow the design gap by supporting designers, testers and developers to work more efficiently.

Background: In order to better realize the real-time on-line monitoring of the working state of the coal mill and determine the status of the equipment used in the coal mill, the intelligent embedded system of the coal mill based on DSP was studied. Methods: Firstly, the working requirement of the coal mill and the task of data acquisition system have been briefly introduced, and the requirement of the overall embedded system design has been put forward. Then, the structure design was analysed including both hardware and software, and the embedded system design including digital signal processing, and data acquisition was completed. All patents related to intelligent embedded data acquisition and storage system are described in detail. Results: After that, the function test of the actual coal mill embedded system was carried out, which proved the practicability and reliability of the designed embedded system for coal mill and based on DSP. Conclusion: The embedded system improves the automation level of coal mill, and is of great significance to the on-line monitoring and research of large-scale machinery and equipment in the future.

With regard to performance well established SW-only design methodologies proceed by making the initial specification run first, then by enhancing its functionality and finally by optimizing it. When designing Embedded Systems (EbS) this approach is not viable since decisive design decisions like e.g. the estimation of required processing power or the identification of those parts of the specification which need to be delegated to dedicated HW depend on the fastness and fairness of the initial specification. We here propose a sequence of optimization steps embedded into the design flow, which enables a structured way to accelerate a given working EbS specification at different layers. This sequence of accelerations comprises algorithm selection, algorithm transformation, data transformation, implementation optimization and finally HW acceleration. It is analyzed how all acceleration steps are influenced by the specific attributes of the underlying EbS. The overall acceleration procedure is explained and quantified at hand of a real-life industrial example.

Welcome to the DATE 08 Conference Proceedings. DATE combines the world's favourite electronic systems design conference and Europe's leading international exhibition for electronic design, automation and test, from system level hardware and software implementation right down to integrated circuit design. The DATE 08 event features a technical program with 77 sessions covering the latest developments in system design and embedded software, IC design/test methodologies and EDA tools, together with an exhibition with the leading EDA, silicon and IP providers showing their new products and services. Challenges that you all face or soon will face in your daily practice are the increasing design complexity of highly integrated systems, the introduction of reconfigurability and embedded software, and the control of power and variability in nanometer IC designs. All these issues will be addressed in this year's DATE event. For the 11th successive year DATE has prepared an exciting technical programme, with the help of the more than 400 members of the Technical Programme Committee, who dedicated their time to thoroughly review the 839 submissions in 37 topics, ranging from system level down to circuit design and covering all the most relevant application domains. The submissions are organised in 4 major areas: D --- Design Methods, Tools, Algorithms and Languages A --- Application Design T --- Test Methods, Tools and Innovative Experiences E --- Embedded Software After a thorough review and selection process (with an average of 5 reviews per paper), finally 198 regular papers were selected for presentation at the conference. Additionally, there are 46 Interactive Presentations that are organised in 5 IP sessions. Together with the invited special sessions (panels, embedded tutorials and hot topic sessions), this has resulted in a high-quality technical program. The technical program provides a wide but high-quality coverage of design, design automation and test topics, from the system level to the integrated circuit level. Compared with previous years, submissions in the Embedded Software track has increased by 50%, showing a clear trend towards a comprehensive system design focus with integrated hardware and software solutions. DATE has established itself firmly as a true Electronic System Design Conference. This year the conference is held in Germany, at the ICM in Munich and spans an entire working week from Monday March 10 to Friday March 14. On Monday, eleven pre-conference tutorials will be given. The three-full day tutorials cover topics of great interest for system design. The first tutorial deals with techniques to automatically realising embedded system from high-level functional models. The second tutorial addresses the different issues related to communication based design and architectures in automotive electronic systems. The third tutorial discusses several key concepts on system-level design and application mapping for wireless and multimedia MPSoC architectures. Furthermore, eight half-day tutorials are also given, which cover a wide spectrum of topics on specification, modelling, design and test. The main conference opens on Tuesday March 11, with two very interesting and complementary keynote speeches. Dominique Vernay, Chief Technical Officer for Thales, will talk about the challenges of embedded systems design, and Giovanni de Micheli, Professor at EPFL, will present his views on designing micro/nano systems for a safer and healthier tomorrow. On the same day, the Executive Track offers a series of business panels with executives discussing hot topics in design: the perils of 45 nanometers, the changes in EDA strategies from IDM, to fablite to fabless, and embedded systems level design strategies. DATE 08 will again offer two specific days related to special themes. On Wednesday March 12, a special full-day track is devoted to Automotive Electronics---Software and Architecture. This special-day track will focus on the challenges faced by the automotive supply chain with particular attention to system and software architecture design. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of automotive architectures, including ECUs, sensors and communication standards and discusses how new methods, tools and standards for interoperability and component-based design can deal with the increasing complexity of software systems and their need for reliability and guaranteed timely behaviour. In addition, it addresses to what degree existing standards, including AUTOSAR and FLEXRAY and model-based development, can support the development of safety and time-critical software. On Thursday March 13, a second special full-day track focuses on Dependable Embedded Systems. This track will address both conceptual and applied issues for design, analysis and validation of dependable embedded systems. The utility of embedded systems and services is based, in large part, on our depending on their sustained functionality in spite of the encountered operational or malicious disruptions. As the number of transient and also permanent disruptions (given the decreasing device geometries, higher device density, lower voltage latching, faster clocks etc) is expected to increase substantially, this will not only be a key issue for the hardware community but also the systems community in general. Solutions using a combination of hardware and software might be more effective than hardware-only or software-only solutions. This track focuses on both conceptual and applied issues for design, analysis and validation of dependable embedded systems. Besides these special tracks, the main conference is organized in six parallel tracks of sessions, three devoted to design methods, tools, algorithms and languages, one to application design, one to test methods, tools and innovative experiences, and finally one to embedded software. The presentations of the selected regular papers in these parallel tracks are complemented by nine Special Sessions and two Invited Industrial Sessions. The special sessions are organized in the form of panels, hot topics, and embedded tutorials. The topics to be covered include quantitative evaluation for embedded systems design, design and manufacturing at 32 and 22nm, software for wireless networked embedded systems, test challenges for low power devices, quantitative productivity measurement in IC design, and 3D Integration. The two invited industrial sessions deal with industrial system designs in transportation and information technologies. To emphasise that DATE is the major event for the designers, DATE 08 features also invited sessions where Europe's famous consumer industry presents their best designs and design practices. Friday March 14 is the day for the DATE workshops. DATE 08 offers workshops on current and emerging important issues in design, test, EDA and software to complement the regular conference. They provide a unique opportunity for the various research and design communities to spend a day discussing the latest and the best, sharing their experiences and visions. This year's workshop program includes eight workshop themes. Four workshops are related to software engineering, ranging from dependable software to modelling, analysis and development tools. Four other workshop themes cover a variety of topics such as the impact of process variations on design and test, the merging world of Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems, new directions in high level synthesis, and heterogeneous reconfigurable hardware. Each workshop features presentations, invited or submitted, from highly distinguished academic and industrial researchers. Finally, throughout the conference days, DATE offers a comprehensive overview of commercial design and verification tools in its large exhibition hall. Exhibitors include EDA vendors, silicon, FPGA and IP providers showing their new products and services. In addition, there is an Exhibition Theatre featuring talks from engineering managers of the leading electronic manufacturers on first-hand design experiences of commercial EDA tools. New this year is the European projects village where different European and large government funded projects will be able to show their ongoing research and results to the design community and have the opportunity for internal meetings and discussions. The DATE week will be also an opportunity for students and universities to show their research work, through the PhD Forum on Monday evening and the University Booth where hardware and software demonstrations will be shown by different universities on a rotation schedule. The DATE 08 event's program will be particularly attractive to industrial designers, at analog, IC, FPGA and embedded system level, as well as software designers, to researchers and academics as well as to design managers, and an increasing attendance is expected. We therefore invite you to take full advantage of the many opportunities offered to you by DATE 08, to extend your knowledge and/or business in electronic system's design and to exploit the abundant networking possibilities offered to socialise with colleagues, including fringe meetings and a memorable social party with bands and dancing. We hope that you will all enjoy the DATE 08 Conference and Exhibition.

Objectives: After reading this chapter, the reader should be able to do the following: Define an embedded system. List all aspects related to the design of an embedded system. Provide a step-by-step approach to embedded system design. Discuss design tools and practices related to embedded systems design. Apply embedded system design practices in the design of an Arduino-based microcontroller system employing several interacting subsystems. Provide a detailed design for an autonomous maze navigating robot controlled by the Arduino processing board including hardware layout and interface, structure and UML activity diagrams, and coded algorithm.

Power consumption is a subject of serious consideration in embedded systems design because embedded systems are constrained to stringent power and energy requirements. The mission of lowering power consumption and energy usage of such systems is an important task to prolong their usage in real time situations. In this paper, we study the effects of compiler optimisations on embedded systems energy usage and power consumption in real time situations and the importance of running efficient binary codes in realising a more power efficient and better performing embedded system. Compiler optimisations at various levels involving different architectural features have been experimented and it is shown that architecture driven compiler optimisations have a better impact on reducing power consumption and energy usage in embedded system than blind code optimisations.

Since the latest IC technology supports the integration of soft or hard CPU cores with dedicated logic on a single silicon chip, it leads FPGA into embedded system design and arouses the innovation of design methodology. In this paper, a general introduction of embedded system and the FPGA-based SOPC development are discussed. The FPGA-based embedded system can contain microprocessor IP cores and support embedded operating system. The mixed design flow is illustrated and a data transmitting/receiving converter between serial port and network interface is taken as a design example.

Chapter 8 - Interface Design

Memory is a scarce resource during embedded system design. Increasing memory often increases packaging costs, cooling costs, size, and power consumption. This article presents CRAMES, a novel and efficient software-based RAM compression technique for embedded systems. The goal of CRAMES is to dramatically increase effective memory capacity without hardware or application design changes, while maintaining high performance and low energy consumption. To achieve this goal, CRAMES takes advantage of an operating system's virtual memory infrastructure by storing swapped-out pages in compressed format. It dynamically adjusts the size of the compressed RAM area, protecting applications capable of running without it from performance or energy consumption penalties. In addition to compressing working data sets, CRAMES also enables efficient in-RAM filesystem compression, thereby further increasing RAM capacity. CRAMES was implemented as a loadable module for the Linux kernel and evaluated on a battery-powered embedded system. Experimental results indicate that CRAMES is capable of doubling the amount of RAM available to applications running on the original system hardware. Execution time and energy consumption for a broad range of examples are rarely affected. When physical RAM is reduced to 62.5% of its original quantity, CRAMES enables the target embedded system to support the same applications with reasonable performance and energy consumption penalties (on average 9.5% and 10.5%), while without CRAMES those applications either may not execute or suffer from extreme performance degradation or instability. In addition to presenting a novel framework for dynamic data memory compression and in-RAM filesystem compression in embedded systems, this work identifies the software-based compression algorithms that are most appropriate for use in low-power embedded systems.

RETRACTED: Computer aided art design Ps course teaching based on FPGA and embedded system graphics processing

In this paper, we address two key trends in the synthesis of implementations for embedded multiprocessors -- (1) the increasing importance of managing interprocessor communication (IPC) in an efficient manner, and (2) the acceptance of significantly longer compilation time by embedded system designers. The former aspect is evident in the increasing interest among embedded system architects in innovative communication architectures, such as those involving optical interconnection technologies, and hybrid electro-optical structures [7]. The latter aspect results because embedded multiprocessor systems are typically designed as final implementations for dedicated functions. While multiprocessor mapping strategies for general-purpose systems are usually designed with low to moderate complexity as a constraint, embedded system design tools are allowed to employ more thorough and time-consuming optimization techniques.

Learning embedded system design, simulation and implementation opens a new paradigm in developing practical laboratory experiments for embedded based systems. This paper showcases method of learning system circuit design with the use of simulation computer aided design tools like proteus virtual system modelling (PVSM), multism and Tiny CAD. In order to demonstrate this procedure on how virtual microcontroller-based circuit experiments were carried out in the laboratory, PIC16F887 chip was used as the major logic component. Several practical on hands-experiment were demonstrated with the aid of PVSM, and the result of each experiment performed were displayed with snapshot. Although, the intent of this paper is to put forward a technical approach for learning and engaged students in practices, expert in the progression of learning embedded system courses. This hands-on experiment will be an added advantage besides the class room teaching of students, and allows hobbyist, professional scientist and engineers to design and analyze the system design before building a prototype on learning breadboard and before ever making final packaging.

The ever-increasing functionality and the nonfunctional constraints that must be satisfied by embedded systems lead to an enormous growth in the complexity at the system level In this paper we investigate the notion of cognitive complexity and argue that it is not the embedded system, but the models of the embedded system that must be simple and understandable. The introduction of appropriate levels of abstraction in modeling and the associated concept formation help to reduce the emerging complexity by focusing on the relevant properties and omitting irrelevant detail, thus leading to a simpler representation of the evolving artifact. In the second part of the paper we present examples of basic-level concepts that we find essential in the design of distributed embedded systems and summarize the insights by presenting a set of concise design patterns that support the component-based design of embedded systems.