Computer Engineering Commons^™

Design Of An Adaptable Run-Time Reconfigurable Software-Defined Radio Processing Architecture, Joshua R. Templin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Processing power is a key technical challenge holding back the development of a high-performance software defined radio (SDR). Traditionally, SDR has utilized digital signal processors (DSPs), but increasingly complex algorithms, higher data rates, and multi-tasking needs have exceed the processing capabilities of modern DSPs. Reconfigurable computers, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), are popular alternatives because of their performance gains over software for streaming data applications like SDR. However, FPGAs have not yet realized the ideal SDR because architectures have not fully utilized their partial reconfiguration (PR) capabilities to bring needed flexibility. A reconfigurable processor architecture is proposed that utilizes …

Cooperative Remote Sensing And Actuation Using Networked Unmanned Vehicles, Haiyang Chao

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation focuses on how to design and employ networked unmanned vehicles for remote sensing and distributed control purposes in the current information-rich world. The target scenarios are environmental or agricultural applications such as river/reservoir surveillance, wind profiling measurement, and monitoring/control of chemical leaks, etc. AggieAir, a small and low-cost unmanned aircraft system, is designed based on the remote sensing requirements from environmental monitoring missions. The state estimation problem and the advanced lateral flight controller design problem are further attacked focusing on the small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform. Then the UAV-based remote sensing problem is focused with further flight …

Improved Framework For Fast And Efficient Memory-Based Frame Data Reconfiguration For Multi-Row Spanning Designs On Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Rohan Sreeram

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Reconfigurable computing is an evolving paradigm in computer architecture where the ability to load different designs onto a field programmable gate array (FPGA) at execution time has proven useful in adapting FPGA prototypes to a wide range of applications. Reconfiguration techniques can be primarily categorized as Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration (PDR) and Partial Bitstream Relocation (PBR). PDR involves reconfiguring a single Partial Reconfiguration Region (PRR) with a partial bitstream, while PBR is targeted at reconfiguring multiple PRRs on the FPGA with a partial bitstream. Previous techniques have primarily focused on using either slower off-chip memory or on-chip memory-based solutions to store …

An Exploration Of Formal Methods And Tools Applied To A Small Satellite Software System, Russell J. Grover

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Formal system modeling has been a topic of interest in the research community for many years. Modeling a system helps engineers understand it better and enables them to check different aspects of it to ensure that there is no undesired or unexpected behavior and that it does what it was designed to do. This thesis takes two existing tools that were created to aid in the designing of spacecraft systems and creates a layer to connect them together and allow them to be used jointly. The first tool is a library of formal descriptions used to specify spacecraft behavior in …

Coping With The Curse Of Dimensionality By Combining Linear Programming And Reinforcement Learning, Scott H. Burton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Reinforcement learning techniques offer a very powerful method of finding solutions in unpredictable problem environments where human supervision is not possible. However, in many real world situations, the state space needed to represent the solutions becomes so large that using these methods becomes infeasible. Often the vast majority of these states are not valuable in finding the optimal solution. This work introduces a novel method of using linear programming to identify and represent the small area of the state space that is most likely to lead to a near-optimal solution, significantly reducing the memory requirements and time needed to arrive …

Constraint Programming Techniques For Generating Efficient Hardware Architectures For Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Atul Kumar Shah

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents an approach for modeling and generating efficient hardware architectures using constraint programming techniques, targeting field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The focus of this thesis is the derivation of optimal or near-optimal schedules for streaming applications from data flow graphs (DFGs). The resulting schedules are then used to facilitate the architecture generation process. Most streaming applications, like digital singal processing (DSP) algorithms, are repetitive in nature: the same computation is performed on different data items. This repetitive nature of streaming applications can be used to expose additional parallelism available across different iterations, by creating multiple instances of the …

Decentralized Coordination Of Multiple Autonomous Vehicles, Yongcan Cao

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation focuses on the study of decentralized coordination algorithms of multiple autonomous vehicles. Here, the term decentralized coordination is used to refer to the behavior that a group of vehicles reaches the desired group behavior via local interaction. Research is conducted towards designing and analyzing distributed coordination algorithms to achieve desired group behavior in the presence of none, one, and multiple group reference states.

Decentralized coordination in the absence of any group reference state is a very active research topic in the systems and controls society. We first focus on studying decentralized coordination problems for both single-integrator kinematics and …

Accelerated Frame Data Relocation On Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array, Ramachandra Kallam

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Emerging reconfiguration techniques that include partial dynamic reconfiguration and partial bitstream relocation have been addressed in the past in order to expose the flexibility of field programmable gate array at runtime. Partial bitstream relocation is a technique used to target a partial bitstream of a partial reconfigurable region (PRR) onto other identical reconfigurable regions inside an FPGA, while partial dynamic reconfiguration is used to target a single reconfigurable region. Prior works in this domain aim to minimize "relocation time" with the help of on-chip or on-line processing. In this thesis, a novel PRR-PRR relocation algorithm is proposed and implemented both …

A Finite Domain Constraint Approach For Placement And Routing Of Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures, Rohit Saraswat

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Scheduling, placement, and routing are important steps in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design. Researchers have developed numerous techniques to solve placement and routing problems. As the complexity of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) increased over the past decades, so did the demand for improved place and route techniques. The primary objective of these place and route approaches has typically been wirelength minimization due to its impact on signal delay and design performance. With the advent of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the same place and route techniques were applied to FPGA-based design. However, traditional place and route techniques may …

The Pursuit Of An Unequivocal Primary Representation, Delroy A. Brinkerhoff

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A chief human characteristic is the desire and ability to change the world. Prior planning is crucial when those changes are complex and extensive, and require the cooperation of many people. To satisfy this need, many disciplines have developed specialized notations for representing the plans. Developers in one discipline, computer-based instruction, are burdened by the current need to use two separate notations. Instructional experts design the instruction and represent the design with a primary representation. The instruction described in a primary representation is easy to see, which makes the representation suitable for evaluation, communication, and enhancement. Programmers translate the primary …

Bio-Inspired Distributed Constrained Optimization Technique And Its Application In Dynamic Thermal Management, Saranya Chandrasekaran

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The stomatal network in plants is a well-characterized biological system that hypothetically solves the constrained optimization problem of maximizing CO₂ uptake from the air while constraining evaporative water loss during the process of photosynthesis. There are numerous such constrained optimization problems present in the real world as well as in computer science. This thesis work attempts to solve one such constrained optimization problem in a distributed manner by taking a cue from the dynamics of stomatal networks. The problem considered here is Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) in a multi-processing element system in computing. There have been several approaches in …