Communication and digital signal processing applications of today are often developed as fully integrated systems on one single chip and are implemented as application specific integrated circuits using e.g. VLSI technology. As the systems are getting more and more complex in terms of speed and performance the chip size and the design time tend to increase rapidly. This will result in search for cheaper and less time consuming alternatives. One alternative is field programmable gate arrays, so called FPGAs. The FPGAs are getting faster, cheaper and the number of gates increases all the time. A long list of ready to use functional blocks so called intellectual property (IP) blocks can be used in FPGAs. The latest FPGAs can also be bought with one or more embedded processors, in form of hard processor cores or as licenses for soft processor cores. This will speed up the design phase and of course also decrease the crucial time to market even more. The purpose of this master’s thesis was to develop a waveform generator to generate a sine signal and a cosine signal, I and Q, used for radio/radar applications. The digital signals should have an output data rate of at least 100 MHz. The digital part of the system should be implemented in hardware using e.g. an FPGA. To convert the digital signals to analog signals two D/A converters are used. The analog signals, I and Q, should have a bandwidth of 1 MHz - 11 MHz. The waveform generator was developed and implemented using a Virtex II FPGA from Xilinx. An embedded microprocessor within the FPGA, MicroBlaze, in form of a soft processor core was used to control the system. A user interface program running on the microprocessor was also developed. Testing of the whole system, both hardware and software, was done. The system is able to generate digital sine and cosine curves of an output data rate of 100 MHz.

In a system like a Scania heavy duty truck, faultcodes (DTCs) are generated and stored locally in the ECUs when components, e.g. sensors or actuators, malfunction. Tests are run periodically to detect failure in the system. The test results are processed by the diagnostic system that tries to isolate the faulty components and set local faultcodes. Currently, in a Scania truck, local diagnoses are only based on local diagnostic information, which the DTCs are based upon. The diagnosis statement can, however, be more complete if diagnoses from other ECUs are considered. Thus a system that extends the local diagnoses by exchanging diagnostic information between the ECUs is desired. The diagnostic information to share and how it should be done is elaborated in this thesis. Further, a model of distributed diagnosis is given and a few distributed diagnostic algorithms for transmitting and receiving diagnostic information are presented. A basic idea that has influenced the project is to make the diagnostic system scalable with respect to hardware and thereby making it easy to add and remove ECUs. When implementing a distributed diagnostic system in networked real-time embedded systems, technical problems arise such as memory handling, process synchronization and transmission of diagnostic data and these will be discussed in detail. Implementation of a distributed diagnostic system is further complicated due to the fact that the isolation process is a non deterministic job and requires a non deterministic amount of memory.

Debugging is an important phase in the embedded software development cycle because of its high proportion in the overall cost in the product development. Debugging is difficult for real-time applications as such programs are time-sensitive and must meet deadlines in often a resource constrained environment. A common approach for real-time systems is to monitor the execution instead of stepping through the program, because stepping will usually violate all deadline constraints. We consider a time-triggered approach for program monitoring at runtime, resulting in bounded and predictable overhead. In time-triggered execution monitoring, a monitor runs as a separate process in parallel with an application program and samples the program's state periodically to evaluate a set of properties. Applying this technique in computing systems, results in bounded and predictable overhead. However, the time-triggered approach can have high overhead depending on the granularity of the monitoring effort. To reduce this overhead, we instrument the program with markers that will require to sample less frequently and thus reduce the overhead. This leads to interesting problems of (a) where to place the markers in the code and (b) how to manipulate the markers. While related work investigates the first part, in this work, we investigate the second part. We investigate different instrumentation schemes and propose two new schemes based on bitvectors that significantly reduce the overhead for time-triggered execution monitoring. Time-triggered execution monitoring suffers from several drawbacks such as; the time-triggered monitor requires certain synchronization features at the operating system level and may suffer from various concurrency and synchronization dependencies in a real-time setting. Furthermore, the time-triggered execution monitoring scheme requires the embedded environment to provide multi-tasking features. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a new method called time-triggered self-monitoring, where the program under inspection is instrumented, so that it self-samples its state in a periodic fashion without requiring assistance from an external monitor or an internal timer. The experimental results show that a time-triggered self-monitored program performs significantly better in terms of execution time, binary code size, and context switches when compared to the same program monitored by an external time-triggered monitor.

To address odour and gas problems generated by livestock facilities, air dispersion models have been used to determine reasonable science-based setback distances between the livestock operations and the neighbouring residences. However, none of the existing models consider diurnal, seasonal and climate variations of odour and gas (ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide) concentrations and emission rates (OGCER), which may result in great uncertainties in setback distance calculations. Thus, the purpose of this project was to monitor and model diurnal and seasonal OGCER from swine grower/finisher rooms. Specifically, this research was conducted to: 1) characterize diurnal OGCER between two different flooring systems (fully and partially slatted floorings) under three different weather conditions (August, October and February); 2) identify seasonal OGCER over a 12-month measuring period; and 3) develop mathematical models to predict the OGCER. <p>A two-factorial strip-block experiment was designed for measuring diurnal OGCER in two grower/finisher rooms. It was found that: 1) the diurnal OGCER in the fully slatted flooring system was 27.6 to 39.5% higher than that in the partially slatted flooring system; however, no significant differences in the diurnal OGCER were found between the two rooms, except for the NH3 concentrations in August, the NH3 and H2S concentrations and emissions in October, and odour concentrations and emissions in February (P > 0.05), and 2) significant diurnal variations in the OGCER (except for the odour concentrations and H2S emissions) have been observed in August (P < 0.05); only gas emissions showed significant fluctuation patterns in October (P < 0.05); no significant variations in the OGCER (except for the CO2 concentrations and emissions) were found in February (P > 0.05). <p>A repeated measurement method was used to monitor seasonal OGCER in four grower/finisher rooms over a period of 12 months. It was found that: 1) the seasonal OGCER from the fully slatted flooring system was 2.9 to 40.6% higher than that from the partially slatted flooring system; however, the seasonal OGCER (except for the NH3 concentrations in October, November and January; the CO2 concentrations in August and the CO2 emissions in December) between the two different floors for each measuring month did not differ significantly (P > 0.05); and 2) the seasonal OGCER was significantly affected by the sampling month (P < 0.05), and no specific seasonal pattern was observed. <p> The statistical models developed for each type of the flooring system determined the OGCER based on the room and ambient temperatures, the ventilation rates and the animal units. The predicted results showed good agreement with measured values for most of OGCER (r2: 0.67-0.95). In order to improve odour and gas prediction models, animal activity and dirtiness of pens should be further investigated.

Abstract Title: Mobile Broadband: A Market Research Level: Thesis for Master of Business Administration in Marketing Management Address: University of Gävle Department of Business Administration 801 76 Gävle Sweden Telephone (+46) 26 64 85 00 Telefax (+46) 26 64 85 89 Web site http://www.hig.se Author: Hibel Sobbizadeh Supervisor: Maria Fregidou-Malama Date: 2010-01 Aim: This research is performed in order to investigate about Mobile Broadband (MB) market and the evolution of mobile broadband modems in this market. The aim is to find out how the MB market is developing and which MB modems are dominating the market at present and future time. The study describes the history behind the MB market and its present and future state where an increase of “internet connected” devices is almost inevitable. It at the same time discusses how the MB modems are developing from today‟s PC data cards and USB dongles to integrated modules in different devices. Method: The research is based on published and unpublished articles and data found on internet. Different search engines and databases such as Google and Gävle University library-databases are used to find various data. This empirical data is then connected to theory containing Marketing analysis, planning, implementation and control. The analysis 3 part (PEST) gives a picture of the Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors of the MB market, while the planning, implementation and control parts of the work give an overview of the threats and opportunities of the market and the strategies to overcome the problems and embrace the opportunities. Result &amp; Conclusions: The study demonstrates that MB market has potential of becoming a successful market where devices with embedded module will be connected to internet anywhere at anytime. This requires cooperation from all the players in the value chain. The companies that choose and implement the best marketing and value chain cooperation strategies will be leaders of this future market. Suggestion for future research: One of the biggest challenges and limitations during the work of this study due to its newness was to find empirical data about MB market. As the time passes new information and statistics will make it easier for further research. As the technology is developing rapidly it is recommended to use the latest articles and statistics on internet when gathering new research material. Contribution of the thesis: This study contains valuable input to people and organizations who would like to get an overview of the MB and MB modem markets‟ development in the coming years. Key words: Mobile Broadband, PEST analysis, marketing planning, marketing strategy, marketing implementation, marketing control, embedded modules.

This report details the design of a garbage collection (GC) module, which introduces modern GC features to the domain of embedded implementations. The described design supports weak references and feeds reference queues. Its architecture allows multiple concurrent application cores operating as mutators on the shared memory managed by the GC module. The garbage collection is exact and fully concurrent so as to enable the uninterrupted computational progress of the mutators. It combines a distributed root marking with a centralized heap scan of the managed memory. It features a novel mark-and-copy GC strategy on a segmented memory, which thereby overcomes both the tremendous space overhead of two-space copying and the compaction race of mark-and-compact approaches. The proposed GC architecture has been practically implemented and proven using the embedded bytecode processor SHAP as a sample testbed. The synthesis results for settings up to three SHAP mutator cores are given and online functional measurements are presented. Basic performance dependencies on the system configuration are evaluated.

As emerging portable multimedia applications demand more and more computational throughput with limited energy consumption, the need for high-efficiency, high-throughput embedded processing is becoming an important challenge in computer architecture. In this regard, this dissertation addresses application-, architecture-, and technology-level issues in existing processing systems to provide efficient processing of multimedia in many, or ideally all, of its form. In particular, this dissertation explores color imaging in multimedia while focusing on two architectural enhancements for memory- and performance-hungry embedded applications: (1) a pixel-truncation technique and (2) a color-aware instruction set (CAX) for embedded multimedia systems. The pixel-truncation technique differs from previous techniques (e.g., 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 subsampling) used in image and video compression applications (e.g., JPEG and MPEG) in that it reduces the information content in individual pixel word sizes rather than in each dimension. Thus, this technique drastically reduces the bandwidth and memory required to transport and store color images without perceivable distortion in color. At the same time, it maintains the pixel storage format of color image processing in which each pixel computation is performed simultaneously on 3-D YCbCr components, which are widely used in the image and video processing community. CAX supports parallel operations on two-packed 16-bit (6:5:5) YCbCr data in a 32-bit datapath processor, providing greater concurrency and efficiency for processing color image sequences. This dissertation presents the impact of CAX on processing performance and on both area and energy efficiency for color imaging applications in three major processor architectures: dynamically scheduled (superscalar), statically scheduled (very long instruction word, VLIW), and embedded single instruction multiple data (SIMD) array processors. Unlike typical multimedia extensions, CAX obtains substantial performance and code density improvements through direct support for color data processing rather than depending solely on generic subword parallelism. In addition, the ability to reduce data format size reduces system cost. The reduction in data bandwidth also simplifies system design. In summary, CAX, coupled with the pixel-truncation technique, provides an efficient mechanism that meets the computational requirements and cost goals for future embedded multimedia products.

Structured technique is the traditional and the popular systems analysis and design language. With the rapid progress and development of information technology, embedded systems have penetrated into most of the equipments which we used daily. Over the past few years a considerable effort has been made in modeling the platform independent model (PIM) for business information systems. However, the detailed guideline for modeling the PIM of embedded systems is lacking. This study proposed a PIM modeling methodology with structured technique for embedded systems. The structured modeling process is consisted of three parts: requirement modeling, process modeling and module modeling. For each part, its modeling tool, modeling processes and rules are provided. The research methodology is articulated using the design science research methodology. A usability evaluation is performed to demonstrate its applicability with a real-world embedded system case. The evaluation results indicated that with this proposed method, the system developer can easily and effectively analyze and design the embedded systems with structured technique.

Microstructures are usually fabricated on the surface of optical sheets to improve the optical characteristics. In this study, a new fabrication process with UV (ultraviolet) laser direct writing method is developed to embed microstructures inside the glass. Then the optical properties of glass such as reflection and refraction indexes can be modified. Single- and multi-layer microstructures are designed and embedded inside glasses to modify the optical characteristics. Both luminance and uniformity can be controlled with the embedded microstructures. Thus, the glass with inside pattern can be used as a light guide plate to increase optical performance. First, an optical software, FRED, is applied to design the microstructure configuration. Then, UV laser direct writing with output power: 2.5~ 2.6 W, repetition rate: 30 kHz, wave length: 355nm and pulse duration: 15ns is used to fabricate the microstructures inside the glass. The effect of pattern dimension such as the pitch, the layer gap, and the number of layer on the optical performance is discussed. Machining capacity of UV laser is ranging from micron to submicrometer; hence various dimensions of dot, line width, and layers can be easily embedded in the glass by one simple process. In addition, the embedded microstructures can be fabricated less damage and contamination. Finally, the optical performance of the glasses with various configurations is measured by using Spectra Colorometer (Photo Research PR650) and compared with the simulated results.

In this paper, we focus on the goodness of fit test for self-similar property of two well-known processes: the fractional Brownian motion and the fractional autoregressive integrated moving average process. The Hurst parameter of the self-similar process is estimated by the embedding branching process method proposed by Jones and Shen (2004). The goodness of fit test for self-similarity is based on the Pearson chi-square test statistic. We approximate the null distribution of the test statistic by a scaled chi-square distribution to correct the size bias problem of the conventional chi-square distribution. The scale parameter and degrees of freedom of the test statistic are determined via regression method. Simulations are performed to show the finite sample size and power of the proposed test. Empirical applications are conducted for the high frequency financial data and human heart rate data.