Simulators are important tools for analyzing and evaluating different design options for wireless sensor networks (sensornets) and hence, have been intensively studied in the past decades. However, existing simulators only support evaluations of protocols and software aspects of sensornet design. They cannot accurately capture the significant impacts of various hardware designs on sensornet performance. As a result, the performance/energy benefits of customized hardware designs are difficult to be evaluated in sensornet research. To fill in this technical void, in this thesis, we describe the design and implementation of SUNSHINE, a scalable hardware-software cross-domain simulator for sensornet applications. SUNSHINE is the first sensornet simulator that effectively supports joint evaluation and design of sensor hardware and software performance in a networked context. SUNSHINE captures the performance of network protocols, software and hardware up to cycle-level accuracy through its seamless integration of three existing sensornet simulators: a network simulator TOSSIM, an instruction-set simulator SimulAVR and a hardware simulator GEZEL. SUNSHINE solves challenging design problems, including data exchanges and time synchronizations across different simulation domains and simulation accuracy levels. SUNSHINE also provides hardware specification scheme for simulating flexible and customized hardware designs. Several experiments are given to illustrate SUNSHINE's cross-domain simulation capability, demonstrating that SUNSHINE is an efficient tool for software-hardware codesign in sensornet research. / Master of Science

Simulators are important tools for wireless sensor network (sensornet) design and evaluation. However, existing simulators only support evaluations of protocols and software aspects of sensornet design. Thus they cannot accurately capture the significant impacts of various hardware designs on sensornet performance. To fill in the gap, we proposed SUNSHINE, a scalable hardware-software cross-domain simulator for sensornet applications. SUNSHINE is the first sensornet simulator that effectively supports joint evaluation and design of sensor hardware and software performance in a networked context. SUNSHINE captures the performance of network protocols, software and hardware through the integration of two modules: a network simulator TOSSIM [1] and hardware-software simulator P-Sim composed of an instruction-set simulator SimulAVR [2] and a hardware simulator GEZEL [3]. This thesis focuses on the integration of TOSSIM and P-Sim. It discusses the integration design considerations and explains how to address several integration challenges: time conversion, data conversion, and time synchronization. Some experiments are also given to demonstrate SUNSHINE's cross-domain simulation capability, showing SUNSHINE's strength by integrating simulators from different domains. / Master of Science

During the design and verification of the Hyperstone S5 flash memory controller, we developed a highly effective way to use the SystemVerilog direct programming interface (DPI) to integrate an instruction set simulator (ISS) and a software debugger in logic simulation. The processor simulation was performed by the ISS, while all other hardware components were simulated in the logic simulator. The ISS integration allowed us to filter many of the bus accesses out of the logic simulation, accelerating runtime drastically. The software debugger integration freed both hardware and software engineers to work in their chosen development environments. Other benefits of this approach include testing and integrating code earlier in the design cycle and more easily reproducing, in simulation, problems found in FPGA prototypes.

The move from Standard Definition (SD) to High Definition (HD) represents a six times increases in data, which needs to be processed. With expanding resolutions and evolving compression, there is a need for high performance with flexible architectures to allow for quick upgrade ability. The technology advances in image display resolutions, advanced compression techniques, and video intelligence. Software implementation of these systems can attain accuracy with tradeoffs among processing performance (to achieve specified frame rates, working on large image data sets), power and cost constraints. There is a need for new architectures to be in pace with the fast innovations in video and imaging. It contains dedicated hardware implementation of the pixel and frame rate processes on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to achieve the real-time performance. The following outlines the contributions of the dissertation. (1) We develop a target detection system by applying a novel running average mean threshold (RAMT) approach to globalize the threshold required for background subtraction. This approach adapts the threshold automatically to different environments (indoor and outdoor) and different targets (humans and vehicles). For low power consumption and better performance, we design the complete system on FPGA. (2) We introduce a safe distance factor and develop an algorithm for occlusion occurrence detection during target tracking. A novel mean-threshold is calculated by motion-position analysis. (3) A new strategy for gesture recognition is developed using Combinational Neural Networks (CNN) based on a tree structure. Analysis of the method is done on American Sign Language (ASL) gestures. We introduce novel point of interests approach to reduce the feature vector size and gradient threshold approach for accurate classification. (4) We design a gesture recognition system using a hardware/ software co-simulation neural network for high speed and low memory storage requirements provided by the FPGA. We develop an innovative maximum distant algorithm which uses only 0.39% of the image as the feature vector to train and test the system design. Database set gestures involved in different applications may vary. Therefore, it is highly essential to keep the feature vector as low as possible while maintaining the same accuracy and performance

During the design and verification of the Hyperstone S5 flash memory controller, we developed a highly effective way to use the SystemVerilog direct programming interface (DPI) to integrate an instruction set simulator (ISS) and a software debugger in logic simulation. The processor simulation was performed by the ISS, while all other hardware components were simulated in the logic simulator. The ISS integration allowed us to filter many of the bus accesses out of the logic simulation, accelerating runtime drastically. The software debugger integration freed both hardware and software engineers to work in their chosen development environments. Other benefits of this approach include testing and integrating code earlier in the design cycle and more easily reproducing, in simulation, problems found in FPGA prototypes.