Electronics and Embedded Systems (ESY)
The research of the unit focuses on electronic system design. Advanced electronic systems perform an increasing amount of vital functions in areas like transport, communication or health care. These systems react continuously with a physical environment and have to satisfy different requirements, such as real-time, power, size or costs. The design process is inherently complex, because systems consist not only of analog and digital hardware, but also of an increasing amount of software controlling the functionality of the system.
The unit studies techniques and methodologies for the design of electronics and embedded systems with a current focus on the following areas:
- System-on-Chip Architectures and Design Methods including Networks-on-Chip, ASIC Design, Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Architectures and FPGA based SoCs. The design methods researched vary from analog design, physical design of digital systems, high-level and system-level syntheses.
- Custom Supercomputers for scientific applications like human scale real time brain simulation and bioinformatics applications. Both architectures and design methods are studied.
- Embedded Systems Design with focus on formal design methods for real-time and mixed-criticality multiprocessor embedded systems, in particular system modeling, design space exploration and system synthesis. Research has also been initiated in the area of brain like computing for embedded systems.
- Fault-Tolerant and Secure Design with focus on designing efficient cryptographic algorithms which can guarantee confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of data while satisfying area, performance and power requirements of new generations of product and applications as well as developing countermeasures which enhance the resistance of hardware implementations to side-channel attacks.
The research is funded by the Vinnova, VR, SSF and European projects in H2020 and Artemis.
Head of Unit: Ingo Sander, Professor