The objective of this thesis was to develop an 8051 microcontroller soft core in the Verilog hardware description language (HDL). Each functional unit of the 8051 microcontroller was developed as a separate module, and tested for functionality using the open-source VHDL Dalton model as benchmark. These modules were then integrated to operate as concurrent processes in the 8051 soft core. The Verilog 8051 soft core was then synthesized in Quartus® II simulation and synthesis environment (Altera Corp., San Jose, CA, www.altera.com) and yielded the expected behavioral response to test programs written in 8051 assembler residing in the v8051 ROM. The design can operate at speeds up to 41 MHz and used only 16% of the FPGA fabric, thus allowing complex systems to be designed on a single chip. Further research and development can be performed on v8051 to enhance performance and functionality.

The goal of this project is to develop a flexible multi-core hardware test-bed on field programmable gate array (FPGA) that can be used to effectively validate the theoretical research on multi-core computing, especially for the power/thermal aware computing. Based on a commercial FPGA test platform, i.e. Xilinx Virtex5 XUPV5 LX110T, we develop a homogeneous multi-core test-bed with four software cores, each of which can dynamically adjust its performance using software. We also enhance the operating system support for this test platform with the development of hardware and software primitives that are useful in dealing with inter-process communication, synchronization, and scheduling for processes on multiple cores. An application based on matrix addition and multiplication on multi-core is implemented to validate the applicability of the test bed.

Este trabalho traça um panorama dos PLCs e tecnologias associadas em momentos anteriores e posteriores à publicação da norma IEC61131-3 e discute aspectos relativos à sua adoção. A aplicação deste norma pode trazer ganhos de produtividade no projeto e implementação de sistemas de automação industrial. Esta dissertação apresenta o caso do "Projeto de modernização dos navios-varredores da Marinha do Brasil" no qual alguns dos conceitos desta norma foram utilizados com sucesso. Ferramentas e metodologias desenvolvidas para adequar o PLC existente a alguns requisitos da norma são descritas ao longo da dissertação. A operação do novo sistema de varredura pode ser verificada através dos resultados experimentais apresentados. / This work presents an overview of the PLC and associated technologies before and after the publication of the IEC61131-3 standard. Some aspects concerning the adoption of this standard are also discussed. The application of this standard can increase productivity in the design and implementation of industrial automation systems. Some concepts of this standard were applied, succesfully, to the modernization of the Brazilian Navy mine-sweepers. Tools and methods that were required in order to adapt the existing PLC to the IEC standard are described. The operation of the newly developed system can be verified by experimental results.

Water scarcity for agriculture is one of the most important challenges to improve food security worldwide. In this thesis we study the potential to develop a low-cost controller for a small scale brackish desalination plant that consists of proven water treatment technologies, reverse osmosis, cation exchange, and nanofiltration to treat groundwater into two final products: drinking water and irrigation water. The plant is powered by a combination of wind and solar power systems. The low-cost controller uses Arduino Mega, and Arduino DUE, which consist of ATmega2560 and Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU microcontrollers. These are widely used systems characterized for good performance and low cost. However, Arduino also requires drivers and interfaces to allow the control and monitoring of sensors and actuators. The thesis explains the process, as well as the hardware and software implemented.

abstract: In the era of artificial intelligent (AI), deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved accuracy on par with humans on a variety of recognition tasks. However, the high computation and storage requirement of DNN training and inference have posed challenges to deploying or locally training the DNNs on mobile and wearable devices. Energy-efficient hardware innovation from circuit to architecture level is required.In this dissertation, a smart electrocardiogram (ECG) processor is first presented for ECG-based authentication as well as cardiac monitoring. The 65nm testchip consumes 1.06 μW at 0.55 V for real-time ECG authentication achieving equal error rate of 1.7% for authentication on an in-house 645-subject database. Next, a couple of SRAM-based in-memory computing (IMC) accelerators for deep learning algorithms are presented. Two single-array macros titled XNOR-SRAM and C3SRAM are based on resistive and capacitive networks for XNOR-ACcumulation (XAC) operations, respectively. XNOR-SRAM and C3SRAM macros in 65nm CMOS achieve energy efficiency of 403 TOPS/W and 672 TOPS/W, respectively. Built on top of these two single-array macro designs, two multi-array architectures are presented. The XNOR-SRAM based architecture titled “Vesti” is designed to support configurable multibit activations and large-scale DNNs seamlessly. Vesti employs double-buffering with two groups of in-memory computing SRAMs, effectively hiding the write latency of IMC SRAMs. The Vesti accelerator in 65nm CMOS achieves energy consumption of <20 nJ for MNIST classification and <40μJ for CIFAR-10 classification at 1.0 V supply. More recently, a programmable IMC accelerator (PIMCA) integrating 108 C3SRAM macros of a total size of 3.4 Mb is proposed. The28nm prototype chip achieves system-level energy efficiency of 437/62 TOPS/W at 40 MHz, 1 V supply for DNNs with 1b/2b precision. In addition to the IMC works, this dissertation also presents a convolutional neural network (CNN) learning processor, which accelerates the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum based training algorithm in 16-bit fixed-point precision. The65nm CNN learning processor achieves peak energy efficiency of 2.6 TOPS/W for16-bit fixed-point operations, consuming 10.45 mW at 0.55 V. In summary, in this dissertation, several hardware innovations from circuit to architecture level are presented, exploiting the reduced algorithm complexity with pruning and low-precision quantization techniques. In particular, macro-level and system-level SRAM based IMC works presented in this dissertation show that SRAM based IMC is one of the promising solutions for energy-efficient intelligent systems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2020

abstract: Lateral programmable metallization cells (PMC) utilize the properties of electrodeposits grown over a solid electrolyte channel. Such devices have an active anode and an inert cathode separated by a long electrodeposit channel in a coplanar arrangement. The ability to transport large amount of metallic mass across the channel makes these devices attractive for various More-Than-Moore applications. Existing literature lacks a comprehensive study of electrodeposit growth kinetics in lateral PMCs. Moreover, the morphology of electrodeposit growth in larger, planar devices is also not understood. Despite the variety of applications, lateral PMCs are not embraced by the semiconductor industry due to incompatible materials and high operating voltages needed for such devices. In this work, a numerical model based on the basic processes in PMCs – cation drift and redox reactions – is proposed, and the effect of various materials parameters on the electrodeposit growth kinetics is reported. The morphology of the electrodeposit growth and kinetics of the electrodeposition process are also studied in devices based on Ag-Ge30Se70 materials system. It was observed that the electrodeposition process mainly consists of two regimes of growth – cation drift limited regime and mixed regime. The electrodeposition starts in cation drift limited regime at low electric fields and transitions into mixed regime as the field increases. The onset of mixed regime can be controlled by applied voltage which also affects the morphology of electrodeposit growth. The numerical model was then used to successfully predict the device kinetics and onset of mixed regime. The problem of materials incompatibility with semiconductor manufacturing was solved by proposing a novel device structure. A bilayer structure using semiconductor foundry friendly materials was suggested as a candidate for solid electrolyte. The bilayer structure consists of a low resistivity oxide shunt layer on top of a high resistivity ion carrying oxide layer. Devices using Cu2O as the low resistivity shunt on top of Cu doped WO3 oxide were fabricated. The bilayer devices provided orders of magnitude improvement in device performance in the context of operating voltage and switching time. Electrical and materials characterization revealed the structure of bilayers and the mechanism of electrodeposition in these devices. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2020

This thesis presents a generalized approach for the fully digital design and implementation of chaos generators through the numerical solution of chaotic ordinary differential equations. In particular, implementations use the Euler approximation with a fixed-point twos complement number representation system for optimal hardware and performance. In general, digital design enables significant benefits in terms of power, area, throughput, reliability, repeatability and portability over analog implementations of chaos due to lower process, voltage and temperature sensitivities and easy compatibility with other digital systems such as microprocessors, digital signal processing units, communication systems and encryption systems. Furthermore, this thesis introduces the idea of implementing multidimensional chaotic systems rather than 1-D chaotic maps to enable wider throughputs and multiplier-free architectures that provide significant performance and area benefits. This work focuses efforts on the well-understood family of autonomous 3rd order "jerk" chaotic systems. The effect of implementation precision, internal delay cycles and external delay cycles on the chaotic response are assessed. Multiplexing of parameters is implemented to enable switching between chaotic and periodic modes of operation. Enhanced chaos generators that exploit long-term divergence in two identical systems of different precision are also explored. Digital design is shown to enable real-time controllability of 1D multiscroll systems and 4th order hyperchaotic systems, essentially creating non-autonomous chaos that has thus far been difficult to implement in the analog domain. Seven different systems are mathematically assessed for chaotic properties, implemented at the register transfer level in Verilog HDL and experimentally verified on a Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA. The statistical properties of the output are rigorously studied using the NIST SP. 800-22 statistical testing suite. The output is adapted for pseudo random number generation by truncating statistically defective bits. Finally, a novel post-processing technique using the Fibonacci series is proposed and implemented with a non-autonomous driven hyperchaotic system to provide pseudo random number generators with high nonlinear complexity and controllable period length that enables full utilization of all branches of the chaotic output as statistically secure pseudo random output.

This paper presents the design of a reconfigurable asynchronous unit, called the pulsed quad-cell (PQ-cell), for conformal computing. The conformal computing vision is to create computational materials that can conform to the physical and computational needs of an application. PQ-cells, like cellular automata, are assembled into arrays with nearest neighbor communication and are capable of general computation. They operate asynchronously to minimize power consumption and to allow sealing without the limitations imposed by a global clock. Cell operations are stimulated by pulses which use two wires to encode a data bit. Cells are individually reconfirgurable to perform logic, move and store information, and coordinate parallel activity. The PQ-cell design targets a 0.25 μm CMOS technology. Simulation results show that a PQ-cell, when pulsed at 1.3 GHz, consumes 16.9 pJ per operation. Examples of self-timed multi-cell structures include a 98 MHz ring oscillator and a 385 MHz pipeline.

The main task of this project was to design a program for control system of dry concrete product handling line. This manufacturing line is controlled by a programmable logical controller Simatic S7 300 produced by Siemens company. A graphical touch panel TP 177A and a control desk with buttons are used as human machine interface. The developed program contains functions for control conveyors, manipulator and cleaning station. Management of formulations stored in PLC by operator is also included in program. The theoretical part deals with dimensioning of drives for two mechanical systems of this manufacturing line. Choice of power output of the electric motors depends on required torque. A fundamental principles and rules of five basic programming languages for PLC in accordance with standard IEC 61131-3 are specified here. The practical part describes project creation in Step 7 software and functions and capabilities of projected system by means of user manual.

The goal of the theses is to propose an idea for a generator of a radar polyphase modulated signal, that will operate at a frequency of 30 MHz. At the beginning of this project, an outline of the basic structure of the generator is proposed and a function of a programable logical perimeter is analyzed. This perimeter, together with an oscillator, generate two mutually phase-shifted rectangular pulses in its outputs. The shift phase of these two pulses is set by a program, and operated by single-chip processor. Those pulses are consequently converted to sinusoidal wave with the help of filters, and the required phase is chosen by the multiplexer, which is also operated by the processor. The phase modulation is realized this way. The output signal of the generator is radiopulse, which subpulses are phase modulated by the described method. Individual parts are solved analogously in this Theses.