<p>The purpose of this Master Thesis is to analyze what suitable hardware platforms there are on the market in order to build a low price control and information system for mobile applications, called small display module. The thesis will be underlying material for making a decision for further development. The result of the thesis consists mainly of a Windows CE kernel and a schematic for a CPU card, on which it would be suitable to build the display module. Another major part of the report is the introduction of different techniques that could be of interest when designing a processor based system. The processor architecture that was chosen is the x86. This is mainly due to CPU availability, but as well as the fact that existing software can be used on the display module without any significant modifications. Many interesting processors were sorted out because they hade a very high price on the development kits from the manufacturer and because the possible production volume can not manage this cost. The development kit makes the development easier and can be used for performance tests before prototypes are built.</p>

The purpose of this Master Thesis is to analyze what suitable hardware platforms there are on the market in order to build a low price control and information system for mobile applications, called small display module. The thesis will be underlying material for making a decision for further development. The result of the thesis consists mainly of a Windows CE kernel and a schematic for a CPU card, on which it would be suitable to build the display module. Another major part of the report is the introduction of different techniques that could be of interest when designing a processor based system. The processor architecture that was chosen is the x86. This is mainly due to CPU availability, but as well as the fact that existing software can be used on the display module without any significant modifications. Many interesting processors were sorted out because they hade a very high price on the development kits from the manufacturer and because the possible production volume can not manage this cost. The development kit makes the development easier and can be used for performance tests before prototypes are built.

In this thesis a microcontroller core is developed in an FPGA. Its instruction set is compatible with the microcontroller PIC16XX series by Microchip Technology. The microcontroller employs a RISC architecture with separate busses for instructions and data. Our goal in this research is to implement and evaluate the design in the FPGA. Increasing performance and gate capacity of recent FPGA devices permits complex logic systems to be implemented on a single programmable device. Such a growing complexity demands design approaches, which can lead to designs containing millions of logic gates, memories, high-speed interfaces, and other high-performance components. In recent years, the continuous development in the area of highly integrated circuits has lead to a change in the design methods used, making it possible to economically utilize FPGAs in many designs. A test demo board from the Digilent Inc is used to fit our testing requirements of the RISC microcontroller. The test demo board also had the capability of communicating with a personal computer (PC) so that we can load the program from PC. Based on the modern design methods the microcontroller core is developed using the Verilog hardware description language. Xilinx ISE Foundation 6.3i software is used for its synthesis and implementation. An embedded test program code using MPLAB is also developed, and then loaded into the designed microcontroller residing in the FPGA. In order to perform a functional test of the microcontroller core a special test program downloader application is designed by using Borland C++ Builder. First, the specification from the PIC16XX datasheet is transferred into an abstract behavioral description. Based on that, the next step is to develop a description of the microcontroller core with some minor modifications which can be synthesizable into a FPGA. Finally, the resulting gate level netlist is evaluated and tested using a demo board.

Each year hundreds of thousands of women in Europe need to catheterize themselves instead of urinating the usual way, because of diseases or injuries. However, self-catheterization is hard for a lot of women due to the location of the urethra, and they need some type of aid to help them. The design company MMID in the Netherlands developed a concept with a mirror and a light, which is attached to a toilet seat. Though, it was noticed that it was too hard to handle for the users, hence the authors were asked to improve the user friendliness with the product. Since the intuition aspect was the largest problem they decided to focus on intuition. MMID’s original prototypes were tested by patients and continence nurses to get relevant information that only real users can give, and by mixed women without troubles, to get an insight in the intuition aspect. The nurses and the patients tested the prototypes and were observed, whereupon they took part in a semi-structured interview and a questionnaire, respectively. During the intuition tests the women’s interactions with the prototypes were filmed, and they answered a short questionnaire. The films were then analyzed. The tests showed that the product was very hard to understand and that it gave a feeling of being unstable. This gave the project the focus to make the product easy to open up, without having to assemble it before each use. All important aspects were gathered and several ideation sessions were performed. The results were put together into three concepts and 3D printed prototypes. These models were tested by women interacting with them to see their intuitive actions, which were also filmed. The women also participated in semi-structured interviews. Based on these results a concept choice was made where the simplest solution with one pivoting point was chosen. The concept was further developed and functional prototypes and non-functional prototypes were made. The non-functional models were tested for only intuition among random women, the same way as before. The functional models were tested by patients and nurses at four hospitals in the Netherlands, also these tests were similar to the ones in the first round. The overall results were positive and the product had been significantly improved; a lot thanks to the fact that it did not need to be assembled before it could be used. The biggest negative aspect was that a signifier for opening the product was missing. / Varje år behöver hundratusentals kvinnor i Europa katetrisera sig själva istället för att urinera som vanligt, på grund av sjukdomar eller skador. Självkatetrisering är dock krångligt för många kvinnor på grund av placeringen av urinrörets öppning. Designföretaget MMID i Nederländerna tog fram ett koncept med en spegel och en lampa som fästs på toalettsitsen för att hjälpa dessa kvinnor. Det upptäcktes dock att detta koncept var svårförstått och således ombads författarna att förbättra användarvänligheten hos produkten. Då intuitionsaspekten hos produkten var det största problemet bestämde de sig för att fokusera på intuitionen. MMIDs ursprungliga prototyper testades av patienter och urologisköterskor för att få relevant information som bara riktiga användare kan ge, samt av blandade kvinnor utan åkommor för att få inblick i intuitionsaspekten. Sköterskorna och patienterna testade prototyperna och observerades, varpå de deltog i semistrukturerade intervjuer respektive fyllde i ett frågeformulär. Under intuitionstesterna filmades kvinnornas interaktion med prototyperna, varpå de svarade på ett kort frågeformulär. Filmerna analyserades sedan. Testerna visade bland annat att produkten var väldigt svårförstådd samt gav en känsla av att vara ostadig. Detta gav projektet fokuset att skapa en produkt som kan öppnas upp på ett enkelt sätt utan att behöva monteras ihop innan varje användning. Alla viktiga aspekter sammanställdes och flertalet idégenereringar genomfördes. Resultaten från dessa sattes ihop till tre koncept, vilka överfördes till 3D-printade modeller. Modellerna testades genom att kvinnor fick interagera med dem varpå deras intuitiva handlingar observerades. Detta spelades in på video och kvinnorna ombads även att svara på frågor i en kort semistrukturerad intervju. Baserat på dessa resultat gjordes ett konceptval där den enklaste lösningen, med en rotationspunkt, valdes. Efter detta utvecklades konceptet vidare och funktionella samt icke-funktionella prototyper tillverkades. Dessa prototyper testades i en tredje testomgång, där de icke-funktionella prototyperna testades för enbart intuition av godtyckliga kvinnor, på samma sätt som tidigare. De funktionella prototyperna testades av patienter och sköterskor på fyra sjukhus i Nederländerna, likt första testomgången. De övergripande resultaten var positiva och produkten var signifikant förbättrad, mycket tack vare att den inte behövde sättas ihop innan den kunde användas. Den största negativa aspekten var att det saknades en indikator som underlättade öppnandet av produkten.

The work deals with main aspects of computer efficiency increase. Object of investigation is a system consisting of processor, memory, other components and connecting links called buses. Rather different systems are used in modern world of information, so an interest arises to compare architectures of several producers. Comparison of systems is quite possible as the same architectural features bind them together: processor‘s clock speed, cache, memory, dual channel technology and others. To perform a comparative analysis, software has been used enabling to reveal increase of efficiency of separate computer components. Systems chosen for study are rather new from the point of view of technology: Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon XP and AMD Sempron. Experiments having been fulfilled, it came out that efficiency of a system for the most part depends on processor capacity: increase of its clock speed results in 9 – 13%, L1 cache has an effect even up to 1350% (theoretically), L2 cache – 30 – 38%. HyperThreading has been observed to mostly result in operations with floating point numbers (even up to 68%), and branch prediction would have theoretically to increase efficiency up to 47%. Estimating indicator of efficiency of the whole system, the results show that the main role belongs to processor. Influence of other components of the system is less noticeable. Working peculiarities of memory type determine rate of data selection and transmission from memory. The study has shown that... [to full text]