Hardware Systems Commons^™

Hardware-In-The-Loop Evaluation Of Sensor-Source Selection For Prosthetic Locomotion Intent Recognition, Victoria Asencio-Clemens

Master's Theses

Active lower-limb prostheses use intent-recognition systems to identify a user’s locomotion mode and select an appropriate control strategy, but sensor configurations that perform well offline may be unsuitable for resource-constrained embedded hardware. Existing sensor-selection methods generally prioritize classification accuracy without directly accounting for processing latency, memory usage, or other hardware-dependent requirements. To address this limitation, this thesis develops a hardware-in-the-loop source-selection framework for embedded classification of level walking, ramp ascent, ramp descent, stair ascent, and stair descent using multimodal biomechanical data from transtibial amputee participants. Subject-specific linear support vector machine classifiers were evaluated using trial-held-out validation, and candidate configurations from …

System Integration And Validation Of The Cal Poly Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator Mk. Iv, Bricen S. Rigby

Master's Theses

The Cal Poly Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics Simulator (SADS) is an ongoing project that seeks to enable the simulation and validation of sensors, actuators, and control logic related to spacecraft attitude control. The SADS platform rests atop a spher- ical air-bearing device which allows for nearly frictionless rotation in all three axes. The orientation of the platform is controlled by four reaction wheels arranged in a pyramidal configuration. Over the past few years, there have been significant updates to the reaction wheel subsystem, as well as requests for a more capable central com- puter. Therefore, a new system architecture for the …

Reproducing And Evaluating Charger Surfing: Robustness Of Smartphone Charging-Line Side-Channels, Colby M. Watts

Master's Theses

Smartphones are frequently connected to external, untrusted charging hardware, creating opportunities for side-channel attacks that do not require malware or direct access to device data. Charger Surfing, a recently proposed charging-line power analysis side-channel attack, reported high accuracy in inferring touchscreen input from voltage measurements collected from a smartphone’s charging cable; however, the reproducibility and robustness of these results under different conditions remain unclear. This thesis presents an independent replication and evaluation of Charger Surfing, including the development of an end-to-end data collection pipeline consisting of a modified charging cable, oscilloscope-based recordings, custom Android app, automated trace processing, and convolutional …

Autonomous Vision-Based Litter Collection Rover, Dante Michael Benedetti, Benjamin Scott Tavares, Nathan Heil

Electrical Engineering

This report documents the design, implementation, and testing of an autonomous litter-collection rover developed as a Senior Project Design Lab (EE 460/463/464) at California Polytechnic State University. The rover integrates autonomy, computer vision, embedded real-time control, mecanum-wheel omnidirectional mobility, and a two-degree-of-freedom robotic arm to detect, approach, and collect small ground-level litter such as bottles, wrappers, and paper fragments.

The system uses a two-layer compute architecture: an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano running ROS 2 for perception, SLAM, and path planning, paired with an STM32L4A6ZG microcontroller for real-time motor control and odometry. The robot is built on a multi-level aluminum frame …

Polysaber: A Custom Reactive Lightsaber Soundboard, Pedro B. Medeiros

Computer Engineering

The PolySaber project was developed as a custom reactive lightsaber control system built as a fully custom PCB design. The purpose of the project was to create a lower-cost and more customizable alternative to commercially available lightsaber soundboards while simultaneously providing hands-on experience in PCB design, embedded systems development, and hardware integration. Commercial lightsaber soundboards are expensive, proprietary, and difficult for hobbyists to customize. The PolySaber project addresses this by creating a modifiable hardware platform built around the ESP32 microcontroller. The system supports programmable firmware, RGB NeoPixel blade control, motion sensing, reactive swing and clash effects, onboard audio amplification, and …

Lora Networking Hardware Reference Designs For Terrestrial And Low-Earth-Orbit Communications, Kevin Nottberg

Master's Theses

The work presented here demonstrates a highly robust and tested LoRa networking hardware reference design to meet the needs of the embedded networking company OWL Integrations. The hardware presented integrated a unique combination of features and design choices. The detailing of its unique design is potentially of use to others for use in fielded battery powered terrestrial sensor networking hardware utilizing LoRa. Also, the terrestrial hardware presented is shown to have the capability to support command and control (C2) LoRa links in low-earth orbit beyond terrestrial systems. The design presented has a more U.S. centric component bill-of-materials (BOM), with the …

Gps Tracking Smart Dash Cam Capstone Review, Simrah Saleem

University Honors Theses

This thesis details our design, implementation, and collaborative development of an intelligent vehicle logging system built on a Raspberry Pi 5. Unlike standard consumer dash cams that act as closed "black boxes," our system uses a dual-camera stereo vision setup integrated with centimeter-level accuracy. While we successfully built a functional Proof of Concept capable of event-triggered recording, dual-monitor visualization, and smart detection and recognition, this paper focuses on our engineering journey and the real-world challenges we faced. Using an Agile framework, we split into three specialized sub-teams to handle hardware, database, and interface design in parallel. This structure created unique …

Design And Parametric Study Of A Mems-Based Reservoir Computer For Reinforcement Learning, Andrew P. Carr

Master's Theses

Single-node reservoir computing (RC) is a hardware-efficient approach to machine learning, leveraging the dynamics of physical systems. In this work, two reinforcement learning algorithms, Q-learning and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are applied to a simulated micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS)-based reservoir computer to solve both discrete and continuous control tasks. MEMS-based reservoirs are low-power, compact, and their natural frequencies (kHz to MHz) pair well with real-time control loops. To explore the relationship between reservoir dynamics and learning performance, a parametric study is conducted on two reservoir hyperparameters, reservoir size and neuron separation, using CartPole-v1 and MountainCar-v0. The RC successfully learns multiple tasks …

Retinomorphic Mid-Wave Infrared In-Sensor Processing Engine: Device-To-Architecture Co-Design, Hemalatha Nagaraju

Theses

Conventional frame-based CMOS image sensors acquire full-frame pixel data at discrete time intervals, resulting in substantial spatial redundancy and loss of temporal information between frames. The repeated conversion and transfer of redundant pixel data increases bandwidth and power consumption in machine vision systems. Retinomorphic sensing architectures address these limitations by enabling programmable, analog-domain processing directly at the sensor interface. A compact behavioral model of the PbSe device is developed in HSPICE based on calibrated TCAD simulation data to capture gate-controlled photocurrent modulation under varying illumination and gate bias conditions. Error analysis is performed to quantify the deviation between TCAD-generated photocurrent …

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 …

A Full System Co-Simulation Platform For Evaluating Edge Machine Learning Inference Using Compute-In-Memory, Belsen Lee

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MS) Theses

We present a full-system co-simulation platform for evaluating embedded machine learning (ML) inference using compute-in-memory (CIM). CIM architectures aim to reduce data movement overhead by performing matrix operations in memory, but end-to-end benefits depend on system-level integration costs that are difficult to assess with isolated hardware models alone. To address this gap, we develop an integrated RISC-V QEMU-SystemC co-simulation environment that allows standard embedded Linux to interact with a transaction-level CIM accelerator model via memory-mapped I/O, direct memory access (DMA), and interrupts. To evaluate performance, we benchmark an MNIST image inference workload and a synthetic fully connected neural network, comparing …

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 …

Developing A Framework For Microchip Design Recovery, Eric Diep

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

Due to the increase in diverse chip production over the past decade, reverse engineering has become a difficult and daunting task. This research develops a methodology for microchip design recovery, seeking to validate and reproduce prior approaches to physical reverse engineering using low-cost tools and techniques. We used mechanical hardware abrasion tools and techniques to delayer and capture silicon integrated chip (IC) layout. We focused on the Mifare Classic EVl microchip, commonly implemented in public transit/transportation cards, to extract information for design recovery. The research explores limitations and advantages of mechanical abrasion and optical microscopy in context to modem chip …

Developing A Multi-Band Gnss Remote Sensing Station To Measure Precipitable Water Vapor For Flash Flood Nowcasting, Madison Gleydura

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Flash flood nowcasting in Central and Southern Appalachia is particularly challenging due to steep terrain, narrow valleys, highly localized rainfall patterns, and limited measurement coverage. Traditional remote sensing methods, such as Doppler radar and microwave radiometry, suffer from reduced resolution at long range and signal blockage by mountains. GNSS-meteorology offers an established alternative for measuring precipitable water vapor and is currently integrated into several numerical weather models. Recent research demonstrates that commercial-grade GNSS receivers can produce tropospheric products comparable to those from geodetic-grade equipment. The gaps in mountain coverage can be addressed by developing a low-cost, self-contained embedded system that …

Optimizing Auv Perception For Competitive Underwater Robotics: Analyzing Performance And Simplicity Of Machine Vision Hardware, Joseph King

Honors Theses

Underwater robotics is a growing field with many practical applications, such as pipeline and offshore structure monitoring, deep sea mining, mine reconnaissance/removal, and marine environmental monitoring. USM’s Robotics Club will participate in the international RoboSub competition, where student-led teams build autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that perform a variety of tasks within a pool requiring camera-based object detection. This project analyzes affordable hardware and software options for providing machine vision to USM’s future RoboSub AUV. The performance of an ESP32-CAM microcontroller, Raspberry Pi 5, and Jetson Orin Nano single-board computers running FOMO and YOLO object detection models was compared. These models …

Virtualized And Distributed Neighborhood Data Centers, Benjamin T. Niccum

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

This thesis evaluates whether PCIe-fabric-based resource pooling can support a decentralized neighborhood micro-data-center model under real implementation constraints. The work combines architecture design, prototype deployment, performance benchmarking, and security assessment. Results show strong prototype-scale feasibility with low-latency and high-throughput behavior, while also identifying deployment-blocking security gaps and operational maturity requirements. The thesis contributes an evidence-traceable path from concept validation to deployment-grade roadmap planning.

Detection And Management Of Attacks On Synchronized Networks, Michael T. Spearman

Honors Theses and Capstones

The Precision Time Protocol (IEEE 1588) provides sub-microsecond clock synchronization across packet-switched networks and has become foundational infrastructure in 5G fronthaul, industrial control systems, and financial exchanges. Despite its criticality, most deployed PTP networks operate without active security monitoring, and no standardized detection mechanism exists for the class of attacks that deliberately stay below conventional jitter thresholds. This thesis investigates whether hardware-level ptp4l offset logs alone are sufficient to reliably detect two such attacks, slowly wandering packet delay injection and rogue master spoofing, and whether detection can occur before severe synchronization failure.

A hardware-in-the-loop testbed was constructed using two hosts …

Analyzing Network Traffic And Data Exfiltration Via Smb In Post-Vm Escape Scenarios, Noah M. Disanza

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Virtual machines (VMs) play a crucial role in modern IT infrastructure environments by providing isolation and enhanced security, among other things, for both personal and corporate systems. VMs are heavily rely upon to safely test malware, manage infrastructure, and reduce risk to host systems. This reliance is so substantial that the idea of reducing risk to the host system is believed to be erasing risk entirely. However, this mindset has shown to be challenged time and time again by the emergence of exploits known as virtual machine escapes. These exploits allow malicious actors to break out of the virtualized environment …

Dashboard And Racing Telemetry, Cole Barach, Jacob Koshel, Ethan Zifzal, Matthew Sullivan

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The main goal of the project is to design and manufacture a combined dashboard and data logger for the vehicles produced by the Zips Racing design team. The dashboard will intuitively display real-time information to the driver and record all received information while driving. This information may be pulled off the device later for performing data analysis. This project will incorporate custom PCB design, surface mount soldering, embedded software development, and the CAN communication protocol.

Automated Pill Dispenser, Ryan Oderkirk, Connor Beaven, Rachelle Labrie, Josue Panchana

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The project we propose is an automated system for dispensing dosages of medication throughout the day. It will be able to alert a user when their pills need to be taken and give them the correct dosages of up to four different medications. These dosages are configurable as well as the scheduled time they are to be taken. In addition, the pill dispenser will alert users when they are low on medications and need to refill the machine.

Nanomagnet Based Reservoir Computing And Quantum Control, Fahim F. Chowdhury

Theses and Dissertations

Conventional CMOS scaling has driven remarkable advances in computing but faces increasing physical and energy constraints, motivating alternative computing paradigms that integrate memory and computation while improving energy efficiency. Nanoscale magnetic systems offer a promising platform for such approaches because their intrinsic nonlinear dynamics and localized magnetic fields can support both classical and quantum information processing. This thesis investigates nanomagnetic systems for physical reservoir computing and, with primary emphasis, for localized quantum control of spin qubits.

The first part explores dipole-coupled nanomagnet arrays as physical reservoirs. Micromagnetic simulations demonstrate nonlinear dynamical behavior with high short-term memory and parity-check capacity, enabling …

Memory-Efficient Acceleration For Emerging Applications Via Hardware/Software Co-Design, Shilin Tian

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Emerging artificial-intelligence and data-intensive scientific workloads increasingly face a memory wall: irregular access patterns and large intermediate data volumes make data movement, rather than arithmetic, the primary constraint on performance and energy efficiency. This dissertation develops a memory-centric hardware/software co-design methodology that jointly reshapes algorithms, architectures, and dataflows to retain frequently reused data on chip. The methodology is demonstrated through three accelerators and an RTL design tool. VITA replaces multi-head attention in vision-transformer-based 3D human mesh recovery with hardware-friendly average pooling and maps the resulting operators to a reconfigurable datapath, achieving 5.05-fold and 69.12-fold speedups over a state-of-the-art GPU and …

Heathammer: Effects Of Thermal Stress On Dram Technology Reliability Using Rowpress And Rowhammer, Filip Roth Tronnes-Christensen

Theses

Modern DRAM scaling has reduced cell capacitance and increased thermal sensitivity, making disturbance-based faults such as RowHammer and RowPress increasingly significant reliability and security concerns. RowHammer induces bit flips through repeated row activations, while RowPress does so by holding a wordline open for an extended duration; both exploit inherent capacitive coupling and leakage mechanisms in dense DRAM arrays. This thesis introduces HeatHammer, a thermally assisted disturbance exploit that interleaves RowPress and RowHammer operations to amplify charge leakage and trigger row-traversing bit flips. Using the FPGA-based DRAM-Bender test platform, HeatHammer is evaluated on four commercially available DDR4 modules from different manufacturers …

Rapid Prototyping Of Low-Cost Sensor Systems Towards A Platform For Upper Limb Posture Estimation, Russell Rathbun

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Physical therapy requires patients to perform repeated actions to achieve meaningful results in rehabilitation. This thesis explores production methods and various sensor systems by utilizing rapid prototyping, inertial measurement units (IMUs), and capacitive sensor arrays (CSAs). CSAs can be made from a wide ar- ray of materials and techniques including 3d printing and laser ablation–to rapidly create CSAs that can be custom fit to enable proximity, force, and touch detection. IMU and CSA systems individually are able to track upper limb movements, ges- tures, and positions. This combination of sensors enables accurate upper limb pos- ture estimation of patients. This …

Investigations Of Secure Memory For Vlsi Based Crypto System, Vijay Sai R Mr

Theses and Dissertations

Semiconductor technology is growing very rapidly in their architectural developments, involving the usage of processor and memory. Presence of memory, in general is a vital commodity in various devices which are almost embedded into human activity, from robust work stations to handy mobile phones. Security of data stored in memory is very important, and hence, observation must be made that these valuable data should not be thwarted by malicious means. Security in cache memory is a major issue in memory related applications such as smart cards and bio-metric implementations.

Cache, is a small and limited memory located between central processing …

Accelerating Gnn Inference On Multi-Core Systems, Binglin Ji

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are becoming increasingly popular, with their applications expanding across diverse domains. As the scale of graph data continues to grow, including larger numbers of nodes, edges, and higher embedding dimensions, standardized libraries such as DGL and PyG have been developed to facilitate GNN computation. However, with the rapid increase in the number of processor cores and the evolution of multi-core architectures, these libraries often show poor scalability and fail to execute GNN inference efficiently on the latest multi-core systems, particularly those with upwards of a hundred cores. To address this limitation, we present FGI, a Fast …

Low-Level Memory Attacks On Edge Assisted Robotic Applications, William Arnold

Master of Engineering Theses

This thesis investigates how low-level memory faults can undermine edge-assisted robotic systems that rely on memory optimization. As robots are utilized in real world applications, the ability to operate safely and successfully in mission critical deployment becomes important. To help achieve these goals, developers are increasingly starting to place computation nodes at network edges to meet latency and reliability requirements. Edge nodes, however, are resource-constrained and resources conservation techniques such as Kernel Same-page Merging (KSM) are enabled to deduplicate identical pages across processes or virtual machines. This thesis shows that this optimization technique quietly widens the attack surface and can …

How’S It Growing? Tools For Observing Snow And Sea Ice In A Changing Arctic Ocean, Ian Alexander Raphael

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

September Arctic sea ice extent has diminished by roughly 50% in the 45 years since satellite observations began. The Arctic Ocean may experience ice-free summers within the next decade, with implications for habitat, resource extraction, geopolitics, and local and global climate change. To predict how Arctic sea ice will change in the future, we need to understand its behavior in the present. In situ sea ice mass balance measurements (snow accumulation, ice growth, snow and ice surface melt, and bottom melt) are essential for studying the processes driving rapid changes in the ice pack, and for validating remote sensing measurements …

Open Source Asic Design Curriculum, Francisco Wilken

Master's Theses

The ever-growing importance of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) in a high-compute world necessitates that college graduates entering the workforce are well prepared to design them. This thesis details the design of novel ASIC curriculum, using open source tools to teach at the undergraduate level. By moving to a higher level of abstraction than classical transistor-focused coursework, chip design material can be made accessible earlier in an undergraduate degree. Additionally, open source tools provide a powerful, free, and portable platform for students to create their own designs, solving assignments focused on industry readiness. Finally, this thesis studies the results and challenges …

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 …