Embedded System Design Research Articles

Embedded Systems Design for High-Performance Medical Applications

Embedded Systems Design for High-Performance Medical Applications

Embedding More Autonomous Safety in MCUs-Based Embedded Systems using Project-Based Learning (case study)

In this research, we present a new technique for learning embedded systems design (ES) that integrates Project-Based Learning (PBL) with conventional face-to-face learning. The PBL course uses a project-based learning approach which offers insights for effective safety feature implementation, concentrates on ES or IoT applications and highlights security in the developed system. This is achieved by using Safety co-processors and Microcontrollers which are secure and cost-effective. Furthermore, the study highlights the key safety modules suitable for integration into MCUs. Additionally, we propose implementing a functional safety layer including a safety co-processor equipped with trusted input/output controllers that contribute to identifying potential failures and increase the system fault tolerance.

Fully Automatic Solar Grass cutter

Abstract: "The term 'Embedded' signifies the integration of multiple independent devices into a single chip, commonly referred to as a System on Chip (SoC). The advent of VLSI technology has enabled the creation of high-speed, cost-effective, low-power, and co impact integrated circuits. The microcontroller employed for these applications is often referred to as an IBP (Itty Bitty Processor) or an embedded processor. "Multi-task oriented systems may introduce time delays, which can be inefficient in certain applications. In such scenarios, microcontrollers play a crucial role in embedded system design. In this context, we have developed a versatile embedded system application titled 'PC-controlled pick and place Robot.' This project serves as a demonstration of the effective utilization of automation and is structured around the integration of a microcontroller and a personal computer (PC). "The objective of our project is to manage the robot using commands transmitted via Zigbee protocol communication from a personal computer. These commands include F (forward), B (backward), L (left), R (right)

Fabrication of Intelligent Braking System

Abstract: The braking system was designed and applied on a car to make the driving process safety using embedded system design. Most of the accident occurs due to the delay of the driver to hit the brake, so in this project work braking system is developed such that when it is active it can apply brake depending upon the object sensed by the Proximity sensor and speed of vehicle. Currently, vehicles are often equipped with active safety systems to reduce the risk of accidents, many of which occur in the urban environments. The most popular include Antilock Braking Systems (ABS), Traction Control and Stability Control. All these systems employ different types of sensors to constantly monitor the conditions of the vehicle, and respond in an emergency situation. An intelligent mechatronic system includes an Proximity wave emitter provided on the front portion of a car producing and emitting Proximity waves frontward in a predetermined distance. An Proximity receiver is also placed on the front portion of the car operatively receiving a reflective Proximity wave signal. The reflected wave (detected pulse) gives the distance between the obstacle and the vehicle and RPM counter gives speed of vehicle. The microcontroller is used to control the braking of the vehicle based on the detection pulse information to push the brake pedal and apply brake to the car stupendously for safety purpose.

Remote field-programmable gate array laboratory for signal acquisition and design verification

A remote laboratory utilizing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies enhances students’ learning experience anywhere and anytime in embedded system design. Existing remote laboratories prioritize hardware access and visual feedback for observing board behavior after programming, neglecting comprehensive debugging tools to resolve errors that require internal signal acquisition. This paper proposes a novel remote embedded-system design approach targeting FPGA technologies that are fully interactive via a web-based platform. Our solution provides FPGA board access and debugging capabilities beyond the visual feedback provided by existing remote laboratories. We implemented a lab module that allows users to seamlessly incorporate into their FPGA design. The module minimizes hardware resource utilization while enabling the acquisition of a large number of data samples from the signal during the experiments by adaptively compressing the signal prior to data transmission. The results demonstrate an average compression ratio of 2.90 across three benchmark signals, indicating efficient signal acquisition and effective debugging and analysis. This method allows users to acquire more data samples than conventional methods. The proposed lab allows students to remotely test and debug their designs, bridging the gap between theory and practice in embedded system design.

Teaching Reform and Practice of Embedded System Design Based on Outcome-Based Education

Embedded system design is the core course of the telecommunication major in engineering universities, which combines software and hardware through embedded development boards. Aiming at the problems existing in traditional teaching, this paper proposes curriculum teaching reform based on the outcome-based education (OBE) concept, including determining course objectives, reforming teaching modes and methods, and improving the curriculum assessment and evaluation system. After two semesters of practice, this method not only enhances students’ learning initiative but also improves teaching quality.

Leveraging Agile Framework for a Project Based Learning Environment in Embedded Systems Design Course

Fast paced technological advancements lays more emphasis on embedded system design to real world applications. This mandates the inclusion of hardwarebased courses like Digital Electronics and Microprocessors & Microcontrollers. These pre-requisite courses introduced in the early semesters pave the way for students to develop keen interest, skill and proficiency in the area of embedded systems and System-on-Chip design. The challenges that lay before the course instructors are to kindle the students' interest in these courses and also to make them industryready engineers. In order to bridge the gap between the industry expectations and skills imparted in the undergraduate education, additional courses are offered to the students as value added courses. The students are offered ‘Embedded System Design using PIC Microcontrollers’ in the sixth semester exposing them to the real time challenges faced during the embedded system development. Further to handle real-time challenges, a modified Project Based Learning (PBL) – Agile based approach is adopted in this course. This paper presents the formation of curriculum for the course addressing the gaps and deployment of Agile methodology during the Project phase of the proposed value-added course. It preludes a habitat similar to the industry so that the students will be able to fit in and fluently blend the transformation from academia to industry. This paper also points out the importance of a well-defined rubric based assessment system, to ensure consistent and unbiased grading of project work by multiple instructors. Also, a quantitative metric ‘Attainment Index (AI)’ - weighted mean of the class quantizes the cohort’s performance in a simpler and more reliable form. A course end student feedback survey is conducted to measure the effectiveness of the employed method. the hiring process while exhibiting greater confidence and additional skill sets to the interview panel, ensuring that graduates are well-prepared to thrive in the ever-evolving field of embedded systems. Keywords—Agile Methodology; Embedded System Design; Project based learning; Rubrics Based Assessment; Self Reflection.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): Challenges and Innovations in Embedded System Design

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): Challenges and Innovations in Embedded System Design

High-performance Embedded System Design for QR Code Recognition with Deep Learning

High-performance Embedded System Design for QR Code Recognition with Deep Learning

Simulation and analysis of ideal low pass filter response using MATLAB

Filters are the crucial element of many modern electronic systems used in control engineering, wireless communication systems, and embedded systems designs. Filters in one form or another, are considered an important subsystem in developing communication systems. The ideal filter cannot be designed through any electronic circuit and the only way is to realize using simulations tools like MATLAB. In this paper, the simulation and analysis of the ideal low pass filter is presented. The MATLAB software is used to generate and perform analysis of the step response of ideal low-pass filter (Si function) and impulse response of ideal low-pass filter (Sinc function) in time and frequency domains. The aim of the work is to provide engineering students an easier understanding of the filter design process in an appropriate way with the help of simple programming. Where, it is easy to generate signals and analyze the ideal low pass filter response. To verify achievement of learning objectives, a survey is conducted from 45 engineering students of electronic and telecommunication which elicited students’ observations and interest in the learning process. Overall about 75% of students gave positive feedback, which indicates that such type of experimentation had a significant impact on the student academic outcomes.

Simulated annealing‐based high‐level synthesis methodology for reliable and energy‐aware application specific integrated circuit designs with multiple supply voltages

SummaryIntegrated circuits have become more vulnerable to soft errors due to smaller transistor sizes and lower threshold voltage levels. Energy reduction methods make circuits more error‐prone since even the smallest amounts of environmental radiation can cause a bit flip. Furthermore, redundancy‐based error detection and correction methods induce higher costs and area overhead. Thus, several conflicting parameters may need to be considered during embedded system design (e.g., area, performance, energy, and reliability). High‐level synthesis (HLS) is the most practical design step to consider all these parameters as complexity increases at lower levels. HLS can be viewed as a multi‐objective optimization problem of finding a set of Pareto‐optimal designs, allowing designers to choose the ones that best fit the requirements. Moreover, the number of synthesis options superlinearly affects the search space growth, necessitating efficient optimization methods. In this study, we propose simulated annealing (SA)‐based HLS methods for multi‐Vcc application‐specific integrated circuit design, aiming to optimize energy consumption and reliability under the area and latency constraints. Furthermore, we use duplication to improve design reliability as much as the constraints allow. We compared our methods against genetic algorithm (GA)‐based and integer linear programming (ILP)‐based methods and showed their effectiveness in finding optimum or near‐optimum results in a short running time. SA‐based methods achieved up to 21.20% reliability improvement on average and up to 38% energy reduction on average, while preserving the reliability value against the GA‐based metaheuristic counterpart under joint reliability and energy optimization on four HLS benchmarks.

Special issue: Advances in real-time embedded systems design

Special issue: Advances in real-time embedded systems design

Report on the 2022 Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK)

Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK) is the premier event covering all aspects of hardware and software design for intelligent and connected computing systems. By bringing together three leading conferences [the International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES); the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS); and the International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT)] and a variety of symposia, hot-topic workshops, tutorials, and education classes, ESWEEK presents to the attendees a wide range of topics unveiling state-of-the-art embedded software, embedded architectures, and embedded system designs.

Electronically Tunable Multifunction Current Mode Filter Employing Grounded Capacitors

The recent advances in Unified Modeling Language (UML) give a valuable milestone for its application to modern embedded systems design space exploration. However, it is essential to remember that UML is unable to solve the difficulty associated with embedded systems analysis, but it only provides standard modeling means. A reliable Design Space Exploration (DSE) process which suits the peculiarities of complex embedded systems design is necessary to complement the use of UML for design space exploration. In this article, we propose a Model Driven Engineering-based (MDE) co-design flow that combines high-level data-intensive application analysis with rapid prototyping. In order to specify the embedded system, our methodology relies on the Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) UML profile. Moreover, the present contribution uses the Parameterized and Interfaced Synchronous Dataflow (πSDF) Model-of-Computation (MoC) and a model based on the IP-XACT standard as intermediate levels of abstraction to facilitate the analysis step in the co-design flow. The rapid prototyping process relies on the πSDF graph of the application and a system-level description of the architecture. This paper presents our Hw/Sw co-specification methodology, including its support for gradual refinement of the high-level models towards lower levels of abstraction for design space exploration purposes.

Strengthening the role of microarchitectural stages of embedded systems design

The growing variety of computing systems, the rapid increase in their complexity, their integration into objects and processes of the physical world require a dramatic increase in the productivity of their creators. It is noted that the quality, timing, and degree of reuse of design results in the field of information technologies strongly depend on design methodologies and routes at the stages of choosing and/or creating stacks of platforms, technologies and tools. The most important role belongs to the ways of describing the organization of the computing system at various levels and to the used systems of abstractions. The problem of filling the semantic gap between the conceptual (architectural) level and the implementation levels is still very acute. So, it requires the creation of industrial techniques and design tools at these “intermediate” levels. The paper suggests ways of presenting design solutions that are aimed at a holistic, end-to-end description of both the logic of the computing process organization and the steps, technologies, and tools of the design process. The content and the necessity of the stages of microarchitectural design of computing systems is justified and explained in detail. Classification of projects in the field of information technologies according to the degree of variability of the project platform is introduced. Several concepts representing a set of abstractions for microarchitectural design within projects with great variability are suggested. The following abstractions are described in detail: project, design and aspect spaces, project platforms and cross-level mechanisms. Examples of several proposed abstractions presentations (design documentation tools) of microarchitectural design stages are discussed that are most relevant in the design of computing systems in the “limited resources” model: embedded systems, cyber-physical systems, “edge” and “fog” levels of Internet of Things systems.

Embedded system design for classification of COPD and pneumonia patients by lung sound analysis.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia are lethal pulmonary illnesses with equivocal nature of abnormal pulmonic acoustics. Using lung sound signals, the classification of pulmonary abnormalities is a difficult task. A standalone system was conceived for screening COPD and Pneumonia patients through signal processing and machine learning methodologies. The proposed system will assist practitioners and pulmonologists in the accurate classification of disease. In this research work, ICBHI's and self-collected lung sound (LS) databases are used to investigate COPD and pneumonia patient. In this scheme, empirical mode decomposition (EMD), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques are employed for segmentation, noise elimination, and feature selection, respectively. To overcome the inherent limitation of ICBHI's LS database, the adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) sampling technique is used to eradicate class imbalance. Lung sound features are used to train fine Gaussian support vector machine (FG-SVM) for classification of COPD, pneumonia, and heathy healthy subjects. This machine learning scheme is implemented on low cost and portable Raspberry pi 3 model B+ (Cortex-A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz through hardware-supported language. Resultant hardware is capable of screening COPD and pneumonia patients accurately and assist health professionals.

Research on multi-functional intelligent ventilator based on UC/OS-III operating system for gas concentration detection

In order to change the traditional gas concentration inspection and exhaust device, the system through the gas concentration to control the rotation of the fan, to achieve real-time gas concentration monitoring, alarm control and GPS global positioning. In this study, STM32F4ZGT6 with ARM Coretex-M4 as the core controller is combined with embedded system design, and MDK is used to develop software programming. Through the ADC MQ-9 carbon monoxide sensor detection module and infrared NDIR carbon dioxide sensor detection module of the output of the analog conversion to digital quantity acquisition and processing, when the gas concentration exceeds the pre-set threshold, triggering a buzzer alarm, timer and the energy conservation and exhaust fan work, implementation is beyond the rapid circulation of the gas and gas concentration inside and outside the display of the time.Through bluetooth and mobile phone connection, real-time check of gas concentration, using the upper computer to control the operation mode of exhaust fan and change the gas concentration threshold. Modular programming is adopted in this study to improve the maintainability and facilitate debugging and modification in the later stage of the study. Through practical verification, the system can realize the detection of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide concentration, real-time alarm monitoring, GPS positioning and change exhaust fan working mode and other functions, with real time, practicality and reliability.

Care4HIP: An Embedded System Design for Discerning Hear-Impaired People in Traffic

Embedded systems are designed for many different applications including navigation, thief warning, smart home, tracking. We designed an embedded system, Care4HIP, Care for Hearing Impaired People, which presents a solution for discerning the hear-impaired people in traffic. Our solution aims that drivers will be able to notice the hear-impaired people. Care4HIP calculates the locational information of these people which close to the vehicle and determines the direction of these people with respect to the vehicle. Location information refers to the latitude and longitude data of each person's location. The proposed system involves server, mobile and embedded system based applications. We think that Care4HIP offers an original and practical solution with minimal overhead for hear-impaired people.

Embedded System Design Student’s Learning Readiness Instruments: Systematic Literature Review

To evaluate and measure the effects of student’s preparation before studying an embedded system design course, a systematic literature analysis was conducted, spanning publications from 1992 to 2020. Furthermore, evaluating such effects may help to close the gap between academically taught abilities and industry-required skills. The goal of the review was to gather and evaluate all reputable and effective studies that have looked into students’ learning preparation issues and solutions in embedded system design courses. Nonetheless, the purpose of this work was to extract and discuss the key features and methodologies from the selected research publications in order to present researchers and practitioners with a clear set of recommendations and solutions. The findings revealed that no instrument has been developed yet to assess students’ readiness to take up an embedded system design course. Furthermore, the majority of the instruments offered lacked concept clarity.

Report on the 2021 Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK)

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Embedded Systems Week</b> (ESWEEK) is the premier event covering all aspects of embedded systems and software. By bringing together three leading conferences (CASES, CODES+ISSS, and EMSOFT), a symposium (NOCS), and hot-topic workshops and tutorials, ESWEEK presents the attendees with a wide range of topics unveiling state-of-the-art embedded software, embedded architectures, and embedded systems design.