Computer Engineering Commons^™

Internet Infrastructures For Large Scale Emulation With Efficient Hw/Sw Co-Design, Aiden K. Gula

Masters Theses

Connected systems are becoming more ingrained in our daily lives with the advent of cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence. As technology progresses, we expect the number of networked systems to rise along with their complexity. As these systems become abstruse, it becomes paramount to understand their interactions and nuances. In particular, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) and swarm communication systems exhibit added complexity due to a multitude of environmental and physical conditions. Testing these types of systems is challenging and incurs high engineering and deployment costs. In this work, we propose a scalable MANET emulation …

Compound Effects Of Clock And Voltage Based Power Side-Channel Countermeasures, Jacqueline Lagasse

Masters Theses

The power side-channel attack, which allows an attacker to derive secret information from power traces, continues to be a major vulnerability in many critical systems. Numerous countermeasures have been proposed since its discovery as a serious vulnerability, including both hardware and software implementations. Each countermeasure has its own drawback, with some of the highly effective countermeasures incurring large overhead in area and power. In addition, many countermeasures are quite invasive to the design process, requiring modification of the design and therefore additional validation and testing to ensure its accuracy. Less invasive countermeasures that do not require directly modifying the system …

Trustworthy Systems And Protocols For The Internet Of Things, Arman Pouraghily

Doctoral Dissertations

Processor-based embedded systems are integrated into many aspects of everyday life such as industrial control, automotive systems, healthcare, the Internet of Things, etc. As Moore’s law progresses, these embedded systems have moved from simple microcontrollers to full-scale embedded computing systems with multiple processor cores and operating systems support. At the same time, the security of these devices has also become a key concern. Our main focus in this work is the security and privacy of the embedded systems used in IoT systems. In the first part of this work, we take a look at the security of embedded systems from …

Time-Difference Circuits: Methodology, Design, And Digital Realization, Shuo Li

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis presents innovations for a special class of circuits called Time Difference (TD) circuits. We introduce a signal processing methodology with TD signals that alters the target signal from a magnitude perspective to time interval between two time events and systematically organizes the primary TD functions abstracted from existing TD circuits and systems. The TD circuits draw attention from a broad range of application fields. In addition, highly evolved complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology suffers from various problems related to voltage and current amplitude signal processing methods. Compared to traditional analog and digital circuits, TD circuits bring several compelling features: …

Design And Implementation Of A High Performance Network Processor With Dynamic Workload Management, Padmaja Duggisetty

Masters Theses

Internet plays a crucial part in today's world. Be it personal communication, business transactions or social networking, internet is used everywhere and hence the speed of the communication infrastructure plays an important role. As the number of users increase the network usage increases i.e., the network data rates ramped up from a few Mb/s to Gb/s in less than a decade. Hence the network infrastructure needed a major upgrade to be able to support such high data rates. Technological advancements have enabled the communication links like optical fibres to support these high bandwidths, but the processing speed at the nodes …

Reconfigurable Technologies For Next Generation Internet And Cluster Computing, Deepak C. Unnikrishnan

Open Access Dissertations

Modern web applications are marked by distinct networking and computing characteristics. As applications evolve, they continue to operate over a large monolithic framework of networking and computing equipment built from general-purpose microprocessors and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that offers few architectural choices. This dissertation presents techniques to diversify the next-generation Internet infrastructure by integrating Field-programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a class of reconfigurable integrated circuits, with general-purpose microprocessor-based techniques. Specifically, our solutions are demonstrated in the context of two applications - network virtualization and distributed cluster computing.

Network virtualization enables the physical network infrastructure to be shared among several …

Design Of An Open-Source Sata Core For Virtex-4 Fpgas, Cory Gorman

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Many hard drives manufactured today use the Serial ATA (SATA) protocol to communicate with the host machine, typically a PC. SATA is a much faster and much more robust protocol than its predecessor, ATA (also referred to as Parallel ATA or IDE). Many hardware designs, including those using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), have a need for a long-term storage solution, and a hard drive would be ideal. One such design is the high-speed Data Acquisition System (DAS) created for the NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission. This system utilizes a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA. Although the DAS includes a SATA …

Application Specific Customization And Scalability Of Soft Multiprocessors, Deepak C. Unnikrishnan

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Soft multiprocessor systems exploit the plentiful computational resources available in field programmable devices. By virtue of their adaptability and ability to support coarse grained parallelism, they serve as excellent platforms for rapid prototyping and design space exploration of embedded multiprocessor applications. As complex applications emerge, careful mapping, processor and interconnect customization are critical to the overall performance of the multiprocessor system. In this thesis, we have developed an automated scalable framework to efficiently map applications written in a high-level programmer-friendly language to customizable soft-cores. The framework allows the user to specify the application in a high-level language called Streamit. After …