Max Koenen, M.Sc.

Enabled by ever decreasing structure sizes, modern System on Chips (SoC) integrate a large amount of different processing elements, making them Multi-Processor System on Chips (MPSoC). If these MPSoCs are used in safety-critical environments it is crucial to ensure that the critical tasks executed on these systems are fail-operational, meaning that they continue to provide a certain level of safety even in cast of a failure in the system.
To demonstrate such a fail-operational system an application is needed to act as critical task. A typical safety-critical task from the automotive domain is a pedestrian detection, especially when considering autonomous driving.

Goal

The goal of this work is to implement a pedestrian detection algorithm in software that runs on the soft-cores of an MPSoC demonstrator system on an FPGA and to integrate the software in the existing demonstrator environment.

To successfully complete this project, you should already have the following skills and experiences:

• Very good programming skills in C
• Experience in embedded programming
• At least basic Python programming skills
• Self-motivated and structured work style

Learning Objectives

By completing this project, you will be able to:

• Understand the concepts of a pedestrian detection algorithm
• Understand the basic architecture of an MPSoC
• Design and implement embedded software
• Document your work in form of a scientific report and a presentation

Max Koenen
Room N2118
Tel. 089 289 23084
max.koenen@tum.de

Enabled by ever decreasing structure sizes, modern System on Chips (SoC) integrate a large amount of different processing elements, making them Multi-Processor System on Chips (MPSoC). These processing elements require a communication infrastructure to exchange data with each other and with shared resources such as memory and I/O ports. The limited scalability of bus-based solutions has led to a paradigm shift towards Network on Chips (NoC) which allow for multiple data streams between different nodes to be exchanged in parallel.
In order to implement a safety-critical real-time application on such an MPSoC, the NoC must fulfill certain requirements: it must ensure that no critical data gets lost, all critical data gets delivered within a certain deadline, and other applications cannot interfere with the critical application. And all this must be guaranteed even in case of a fault in the NoC. Furthermore, to offload the processing elements and to decrease the amount of required buffers, DMA transfers should be supported.

Goal

The goal of this thesis is to implement a DMA Controller in a Network Interface supporting a hybrid Time-Division Multiplexed (TDM) and packet-switched NoC that provides protection switching for critical traffic and to create tests to validate the behavior of the implemented hardware.

To successfully complete this project, you should already have the following skills and experiences:

• Very good programming skills in a hardware description language i.e. (System)Verilog or VHDL
• Solid Python programming skills
• At least basic knowledge of the functionality of NoCs
• Self-motivated and structured work style

Learning Objectives

By completing this project, you will be able to

• understand the concept of TDM NoCs and DMA transfers
• design and implement a complex hardware module in SystemVerilog
• create tests to validate hardware modules
• document your work in form of a scientific report and a presentation

Enabled by ever decreasing structure sizes, modern System on Chips (SoC) integrate a large amount of different processing elements, making them Multi-Processor System on Chips (MPSoC). These systems typically have no peripherals for direct interaction (such as Monitor and keyboard) which makes it difficult to get information about the status of the application running.
For an MPSoC demonstrator system implemented on an FPGA it is necessary to have a means of observing what is happening in the system and to gather statistics about the executed software.

Goal

The goal of this work is to implement a module that allows to gather statistics of an application executed on an MPSoC demonstrator system, as well as to create tests to validate the behavior of the implemented hardware.

To successfully complete this project, you should already have the following skills and experiences:

• Good programming skills in a hardware description language i.e. VHDL or (System)Verilog
• Solid Python programming skills
• Basic C programming skills
• Basic knowledge of embedded systems architecture
• Self-motivated and structured work style

Learning Objectives

By completing this project, you will be able to:

• Design and implement a complex hardware module in SystemVerilog
• Create tests to validate hardware modules
• Adopt embedded software to utilize a hardware module
• Document your work in form of a scientific report and a presentation

Max Koenen
Room N2118
Tel. 089 289 23084
max.koenen@tum.de