Hardware Systems Commons^™

Exploration Of Real-Time Power Electronic Simulation On Amd Npu, Shouyu Du

All Theses

The rapid electrification of the automotive and data center sectors has created a critical demand for high-fidelity, real-time simulation of complex power electronic systems. While Hardware- in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is the current industry standard, it presents significant challenges regarding development complexity and memory limita- tions. This dissertation investigates the feasibility of utilizing Neural Processing Units (NPUs)— specifically the AMD AI Engine (AIE) XDNA2 architecture—as a novel platform for real-time, deterministic circuit simulation. This study establishes a comprehensive automated modeling framework based on graph theory and Massarini’s method to derive linear state-space representations for arbitrary circuit …

Robust Hardware Trojan Detection Leveraging Dual‑Domain Features And Stacked Ensemble Learning, Sefatun-Noor Puspa

All Theses

In Cyber-physical systems rely on sensors, communication, and computing, all powered by integrated circuits (ICs). These ICs are vulnerable to malicious hardware attacks, with hardware Trojans being one of the stealthiest threats. Trojans are malicious implants in the circuitry, which are often inserted during design or fabrication stages. This stealthy addition remains dormant until triggered and might cause functional disruptions or sensitive information leakage once triggered. Traditional IC validation methods, such as functional testing and logic analysis, usually fail to capture these subtle anomalies because hardware Trojans are intentionally designed to mimic normal circuit behavior. They often remain dormant under …

Modality Distillation Using A Sam-Guided Multimodal Teacher For Unimodal Wildfire Segmentation And Temperature Prediction, Michael N. Marinaccio

All Theses

Wildfires are one of the world’s most devastating natural disasters that affect the environment, communities, and more critically, humans that live in and around those communities. Due to the threat of large-scale destruction in landscapes and human inhabited areas, it has become increasingly more important to develop wildfire detection, management, and suppression strategies to mitigate and prevent these negative outcomes. Wildfire research encompasses many different areas. Most notably, the development of communication, navigation, remote sensing, and monitoring systems. In wildfire monitoring, limitations discovered in-ground and satellite observation have shifted the focus toward Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based wildfire research, which …

Lightlink: Visible Light Communication For Batteryless Devices With Variable Computational Load, Charles Phillips

All Theses

Visible Light Communication (VLC) devices have been experimentally proven to work as a suitable communication medium for batteryless devices. However, the effects of practical load have yet to be fully explored. To that end, we have developed LightLink, a new MAC and PHY layer protocol for VLC within batteryless devices, and have studied various ways that computational load can affect transmission accuracy in realistic scenarios. Our key findings point us towards an adaptive VLC reception system based on inferred environmental variables.

Privacy Implications Of Data Collection In Android Automotive Os, Bulut Gözübüyük

All Theses

Modern vehicles have become sophisticated computational and sensor systems, as evidenced by advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), in-car infotainment, and autonomous driving capabilities. They collect and process vast amounts of data through various onboard subsystems. One significant player in this landscape is Android Automotive OS (AAOS), which has been integrated into over 100 million vehicles and has become a dominant force in the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) market. With this extensive data collection, privacy concerns have become increasingly crucial. The volume of data gathered by these systems raises questions about how this information is stored, used, and protected, making privacy a …

Exploiting Physical Side-Channel Information For Offensive And Defensive Ends, Sisheng Liang

All Dissertations

Side-channel information consists of side effects of computation that range from microarchitectural to physical phenomena. Empirical studies have demonstrated the practical exploitability of these side effects in real-world systems for malicious attacks and effective defenses. In this dissertation, we discover, analyze, and exploit certain physical side-channel information for end-to-end attacks and defense across three studies.

In the first study, we demonstrate a new DNN model extraction attack named Clairvoyance that exploits certain far-field electromagnetic signals emitted from a GPU to steal DNN models several meters away from the victim machine, even with some physical obstacles in between. Using Clairvoyance, an …

Resilient, Sustainable, And Secure Systems Support For Ultra-Low-Power Computational Things, Nicole Tobias

All Dissertations

Wireless battery-free and energy-harvesting devices are expanding the reach and vision of the Internet of Things, where trillions of embedded computational things interconnect ubiquitously around us and inform many different aspects of our everyday lives. Designing these systems without batteries and interconnecting wires lowers maintenance, environmental, and economic costs while also extending device lifetime and deployment opportunities. Over the last decade, research on these ultra-low-power embedded sensors and systems has dramatically increased — enabling new and exciting prospects in many different scientific fields, from smart building and health monitoring applications to animal and activity tracking.

These systems are not without …

Towards Enabling Usable Batteryless Wearables, Arwa Alsubhi

All Dissertations

Wearable devices have become ubiquitous in modern technology, providing a convenient way for a large number of users to monitor their health and track their daily activities. However, despite their numerous benefits, wearable devices are not without their challenges. One of the most significant issues is the need to recharge their batteries, which can disrupt users’ daily routines and might result in the discontinuation of device use.

Replacing batteries with capacitors and charging them using the available harvested energy from the surrounding environment (e.g., kinetic, thermal, or solar energy) eliminates the burden of recharging or replacing batteries, resulting in convenient, …

Virtual Prototyping Of Pebb Based Power Electronics System For Ground Vehicles, Yi Li

All Theses

Power electronics are heavily involved in power and energy systems in plenty of applications nowadays. The increase of demand brings more challenges into simulations for development. Considering the complexity of the systems and high frequency operational conditions, this paper presents comprehensive research on modeling, simulating, and validation on ground vehicle propulsion system applications.

To reduce the computational burden, the Power Electronics Building Blocks concept is utilized to simplify the structure of modeling under different conversion scenarios in ground vehicle systems. In addition, the Average and Switching versions models are included. To speedup the simulation, the engagement of advanced computing technique …