Digital circuits designed today are almost exclusively clocked. As designs grow in size it becomes harder to effectively distribute the various clock signals over the circuit. The clock is also a big contribution to the power consumption of a circuit. Some work is being done to provide alternatives to standard synchronous design. One of these alternatives is the Balsa system.Several versions of an asynchronous module for controlling the startup process of a microcontroller was made in Balsa and compared to a standard synchronous implementation. Area estimates for the best asynchronous implementation gives a number that is a factor of over four larger than for the synchronous implementation. The asynchronous implementation has other advantages though. It has no dynamic power consumption when it is in a stable state. Additionally it can operate closer to the sub-threshold area.The asynchronous implementations have been tested and found working in active HDL. Balsa generated verilog netlists in a 350 nm library from the balsa language description. Design Compiler from Synopsys was used to get the area estimates. The asynchronous implementations shows potential, especially with regards to reduced power consumption.

Sammendrag

This thesis presents a platform for a small student satellite. A backplanesolution with slots for 8 individual modules is proposed. The backplane providesthe modules with power and a common data bus, as well as mechanismsfor isolating modules from the rest of the system and a possibility of restoringmisbehaving modules. It has a power consumption of about 100mW.An on-board controller has been designed and tested. It consists of a32-bit MCU, a NAND flash memory for housekeeping logs, an SRAM memoryfor processing variables, an OTP memory for safe storage of modulefirmwares, USB interface and a wireless intra-satellite communication module.The on-board controller has the main responsibility for monitoring andpreserving the satellite’s health. The power consumption will be dependentof the final firmware, but a rough estimate is about 100mW.Also, an experimental wireless intra-satellite communication system isproposed. The system consists of a small wireless module, that will be integratedonto any module that is a part of the wireless network.

With Moore’s law exponentially increasing the number of transistors on inte-grated circuits, developers fail to keep up. This makes chip area an increasinglycheap resource. At the same time, researchers and developers are trying to findways to dynamically reconfigure FPGAs, preferably at run time, so as to in-crease the flexibility of hardware solutions, and close the gap between the speedof hardware and flexibility of software. A proposed way of solving both of theseissues at once is by using nondeterministic finite-state machines as a fundamen-tal unit of design. This could provide great flexibility and dynamic hardwaresolutions, but before this can be known for sure, a system like this would needto be simulated. This paper documents the planning and development of a Sys-temC library that creates nondeterministic finite-state machines from regularexpressions, and a special regular expression syntax designed for this specificapplication. The paper can also be used as a reference for the inner workingsof, and how to use, the library.

Eurobot is an annual competition for autonomous robots. Typically two teams compete against each other for 90 seconds on a 2x3m playing area. The main goal is to collect as many points as possible. There are several matches to determine which robot is the best. The rules are different every year. An autonomous robot for this year's competition was designed and built. The rules for Eurobot 2012 were studied and a design concept was created. In order to implement the design a series of technical pieces of work was carried out. The tasks involved several fields of study including engineering cybernetics, electrical engineering, computer science and mechanical engineering. A laser-tower positioning system from 2010 was further developed and improved. In addition the robots drive wheels hall-sensors were used to compensate for the robots movement. An extended Kalman filter was created to transform these measurements into a position and orientation estimate. Two PID regulators were used to maneuver the robot, one regulator controlling the rotation, the other translation. A circuit board following the EPIC-plus standard with several efficient power supplies, a micro controller and a circuit board stack was designed, produced and tested. This circuit board was driven by a lithium battery and acted as a power supply for-, and took care of low level interaction with, all motors, servos and actuators on the robot. Firmware was implemented on the circuit board that provided an interface to control all hardware via CAN-bus to a tablet PC. To implement strategic choices, algorithms and artificial intelligence, an elaborate software system was created. The high-level programing was done in Go, a new and exciting programing language from Google. A featured Debug-GUI that presented real-time information and allowed for robot interaction was provided. A strong focus on design and a test driven development, resulted in robust and stable software. A mechanical design of the robot was created in collaboration with a group of students through the course TTK4850 ``Experts in team'' at NTNU. This work lead to a complete robot with a clean implementation hosting advanced technical solutions. The final software allowed strategies to be reprogrammed before each match, and the physical robot was easily maintainable. The positioning system can move the robot to any coordinate on the playing area. In the Eurobot 2012 competition, the robot won three out of five matches and ended at 23rd place out of 43 international teams.