Digital Design Projects Research Articles

A Script-Based Cycle-True Verification Framework to Speed-Up Hardware and Software Co-Design: Performance Evaluation on ECC Accelerator Use-Case

Digital designs complexity has exponentially increased in the last decades. Heterogeneous Systems-on-Chip integrate many different hardware components which require a reliable and scalable verification environment. The effort to set up such environments has increased as well and plays a significant role in digital design projects, taking more than 50% of the total project time. Several solutions have been developed with the goal of automating this task, integrating various steps of the Very Large Scale Integration design flow, but without addressing the exploration of the design space on both the software and hardware sides. Early in the co-design phase, designers break down the system into hardware and software parts taking into account different choices to explore the design space. This work describes the use of a framework for automating the verification of such choices, considering both hardware and software development flows. The framework automates compilation of software, cycle-true simulations and analyses on synthesised netlists. It accelerates the design space exploration exploiting the GNU Make tool, and we focus on ensuring consistency of results and providing a mechanism to obtain reproducibility of the design flow. In design teams, the last feature increases cooperation and knowledge sharing from single expert to the whole team. Using flow recipes, designers can configure various third-party tools integrated into the modular structure of the framework, and make workflow execution customisable. We demonstrate how the developed framework can be used to speed up the setup of the evaluation flow of an Elliptic-Curve-Cryptography accelerator, performing post-synthesis analyses. The framework can be easily configured taking approximately 30 min, instead of few days, to build up an environment to assess the accelerator performance and its resistance to simple power analysis side-channel attacks.

Making new history: Contemporary art and the temporal orientations of climate change in Oceania

This article explores artistic production in the region of Oceania that resists the ahistorical and future-oriented temporality of climate change discourse, as it perpetuates colonial structures of power by denying Indigenous futures and ignoring the violent histories that have led to the current climate breakdown. In the video poem Anointed (2018), prominent climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner strategically combines spoken word poetry with visual montage in order to situate Cold War nuclear tests by the US military within the same temporal plane as rising sea levels currently threatening the Marshall Islands. Katerina Teaiwa’s exhibition Project Banaba (2017) similarly mobilizes archival imagery in order to visualize the genealogical relationship between Banabans and the settler landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Sean Connelly’s architectural and design practice in Hawaiʻi Futures, an ongoing digital design project that engages with the threats of sea level rise and coastal erosion in Hawaiʻi, problematizes linear formations of time and favours a future structured around cyclical, ecological time instead. Interacting with vastly different sites, strategies and temporalities, these three multidisciplinary projects provide critical alternatives to the ahistorical framing of colonial climate change in Oceania and thus play a crucial role in constructing a more just future.

Participatory design of digital innovation in agricultural research-for-development: insights from practice

CONTEXTInnovation based on information and communication technology (ICT) plays an increasingly important role in agricultural research-for-development efforts. It has been recognized, however, that the weak adoption and low impact of many ICT-for-agriculture (ICT4Ag) efforts are partly due to poor design. Often, design was driven more by technological feasibility than by a thorough analysis of the target group's needs and capacities. For more user-centered ICT4Ag development, there is now growing interest in the use of systematic, participatory design methodologies. OBJECTIVENumerous methodologies for participatory design exist, but applying any of them in smallholder farming context can create specific challenges that digital development researchers need to deal with. This article aims to support future digital development efforts by contributing practical insights to recent discussions on the use of participatory design methodologies for ICT4Ag development. METHODSWe present lessons learned from practical experiences within participatory design projects that developed ICT4Ag solutions in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Based on these experiences and supported by literature, we describe common challenges and limitations that digital designers may face in practice, and discuss possible opportunities for dealing with them. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSThe outcomes of digital design projects within research-for-development efforts can be affected by tensions between design ideals and project realities. These tensions may relate to, among others, mismatching expectations among project stakeholders, top-down hierarchies at design partners, insufficient attention to the wider digital ecosystem, and disincentives to re-use ideas and software. Depending on project context, these challenges may need to be addressed by researchers during planning and implementation of digital design projects. SIGNIFICANCEThe insights in this article may support agricultural development researchers in facilitating more effective participatory design processes. Even though good design is not the only precondition for a successful ICT4Ag service, this can help create more meaningful digital innovation for agricultural development.

Participatory Research and Design in the Portal to Peru

AbstractThis article explores the potentials and challenges of employing digital and interactive media as part of the research–design process. The Portal to Peru project features an online exhibition of Andean textiles, focusing on the work of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, Peru. The website shares the rich weaving traditions of the Andes with a broad public, including Andean studies scholars and Peruvians who live in Peru and the United States. The research and content for the website draw on key Andean textile studies texts, combined with interviews with weavers and others associated with the Center for Traditional Textiles and a portion of the extensive photographic archives of the Center for Traditional Textiles itself. This article examines this digital design project from the perspective of participatory research, participatory design, and design ethnography, seeking to identify insights about how ethnographers and others can present cultural heritage online in a way that attends to the dual nature of intangible heritage as artifact and process.

An Educational Digital Communications Project Using FPGAs to Implement a BPSK Detector

With the recent advent of hardware description languages (e.g., Verilog or VHDL) and digital implementation for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), substantial academic digital design projects become practicable. The time and effort to implement significant design projects may be undertaken without sacrificing the broad educational demands placed upon the modern engineering student. In the present paper, the design of an all-digital, binary-phase-shift-keying (BPSK) demodulator is described. The project details the design of the components (e.g., Booth multipliers and pseudorandom noise (PN) generators) and the simulation of the entire system. The entire system was designed using the Verilog hardware description language and implemented on an Altera 10-k FPGA device. This paper verifies that students are capable of accomplishing significant signal processing projects that provide educational benefits. Projects can readily be extended by developing several such projects across a class and then integrating distinct projects into more fully developed systems. The project described in This work is the design and simulation of a BPSK correlation detector.

International Collaborative Digital Decorative Design Project

This international collaborative digital design project, initially by two and then three collaborators (from three geographic locations), illustrates a joint commitment to work together to develop an exhibition that combines overlapping interests in art, design, ancient Chinese artifacts, fabric design and technology. The project began with initial travel to a university in Beijing that encouraged collaborations between educators. Once the project commenced, issues came up that required modifications from the original vision but mutual perseverance overcame communication challenges, technology hardware problems, and production problems. The culmination of the project resulted in new findings, an expansion of knowledge and skills, and an enriching experience for digital collaborators from the United States, China, and Taiwan. This project had the ingredients that led to a cultural, scholarly, and aesthetic interchange of ideas and visions. The resultant opening exhibition(s) of over ninety pieces (and Web exhibition <http://www.cadtextiledesign.com/>) is titled Inspirational Chinese Designs: East and West Interpretations and consists of fabric posters, wall hangings/scarves, and fabric yardage.