• 095906 - EMBEDDED SYSTEMS 1

Objectives

The goal of the course is to provide competencies and design methodologies tailored to realize embedded applications including the choice of the technologies, the management of the design flow and the selection of the toolchain.
Such applications range from Cyber Physical Systems for consumer electronics to industrial or medical devices. In general any consumer electronics product is an embedded systems. Their design requires the coordination of cross competencies to identify the optimal solution under a number of aspects including flexibility, standardization, cost, size, energy and power, performance, etc.

One of the objectives of the course is to create a valuable bridge to the best industrial practices, providing the competencies regarding: architectures for PCB and SoC based embedded systems exploiting MEMS sensors; communication and interfacing standards popular in the embedded system marke, energy aware design of software and hardware, including run-time management of the resources.
Hands-on labs will be proposed to the students (participation in optional) to show how to use STM/ARM development boards to interface external sensors and peripherals. Case studies related to real products will be presented to make the student aware on the real trade-off to be considered.

To enhance the knowledge related to the development of software for embedded applications it is recommended to follow the course Advanced Operating Systems.

During the course some meetings with representatives from the industry will be scheduled to propose stages and master thesis.

Detailed Program

Introduction and background
General characteristics of an embedded system
Requirements and constraints for the different application fields
Trends of the market and of the best design practices
Development flow for Hw-Sw architectures
Energy and power optimization

Hardware platforms for Embedded Systems
Software executors: general purpose, dedicated processors, DSP, Network processors, Microcontrollers, Multi-Many cores and clusters.
Communication architectures: standard buses, Network-on-Chip (NoC), field buses, wireless interfaces, examples.
Hardware executors: characteristics of the application specific IC and related design flow, systems for fast prototyping, reconfigurable and updatable systems, examples of off-the-shelf (PCB-based) designs and wireless sensor networks.

Software architectures for Embedded Systems
Abstraction layers: assembler, library, system software, middleware
Software development environment and toolchains for the realization of the embedded software
Introduction to the real-time operating systems: general features, scheduler, configuration, dynamic management of the resources, soft real time features, energy optimization and resource management.
Analysis of the embedded software: formalisms and tools for analysis/profiling of the code, energy optimization
Examples: RT extension of Linux, Android, RTX, operating systems for wireless sensor networks, frameworks for run-time management of resources, Linux Device Drivers model.

Analysis and optimization of Hw/Sw Systems
Analysis of the project constraints and selection of the best implementing architecture with particular emphasis on realization time and cost.
Problems related to the estimation of Power/Performance at the different abstraction levels
Optimization of power and performance at the different abstraction levels
Analysis and modeling of thermal problems with particular attention to the multi-core architectures with NoC-based communication
Management and planning of embedded systems: models for the development flow, design for resuse and estimation of hw and sw development time and cost, project management.

Case studies
Example of the analysis to be performed during a feasibility study.
Example of real designs at different granularities, from the wireless sensor networks to embedded application exploiting multiprocessor cores, systems with MEMS, software for white goods and automotive, certification
In each of the use case it will but in evidence the set of trade-offs to be considered

Laboratory
Hands-on labs will be proposed to the students (participation is optional) to show how to use STM/ARM development boards to interface external sensors and peripherals.

The exams will follows the official rules of the Politecnico di Milano and more information can be found on the web site of the lecturer. During the course it will be presented a set of possible topics for projects, whose evaluation will be part of the final score.

There exists alternative books in english

see web site of the lecturer