VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems Commons^™

Vehicular Motion Sensor: Developing A Wide-Range Motion Sensing Alarm System, Joshua Isaacson

Senior Honors Theses

Vehicular safety has become a serious concern in recent years. Many drivers have difficulty backing out of parking spaces, especially when large trucks and sport utility vehicles block the peripheral view from smaller vehicles. This can lead to accidents and pedestrian injuries when drivers are unable to see or do not pay careful attention to their surroundings.

Vehicular motion sensor systems can alert drivers of approaching obstacles when attempting to back out of parking spaces with limited visibility. This thesis aims to explain the limitations of current systems and the research conducted by the author to develop a prototype for …

Fpga-Based Implementation Of Dual-Frequency Pattern Scheme For 3-D Shape Measurement, Brent Bondehagen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Structured Light Illumination (SLI) is the process where spatially varied patterns are projected onto a 3-D surface and based on the distortion by the surface topology, phase information can be calculated and a 3D model constructed. Phase Measuring Profilometry (PMP) is a particular type of SLI that requires three or more patterns temporarily multiplexed. High speed PMP attempts to scan moving objects whose motion is small so as to have little impact on the 3-D model. Given that practically all machine vision cameras and high speed cameras employ a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) interface directly to the image sensors, …

Reliable Software Updates For On-Orbit Cubesat Satellites, Sean Fitzsimmons

Master's Theses

CubeSat satellites have redefined the standard solution for conducting missions in space due to their unique form factor and cost. The harsh environment of space necessitates examining features that improve satellite robustness and ultimately extend lifetime, which is typical and vital for mission success. The CubeSat development team at Cal Poly, PolySat, has recently redefined its standard avionics platform to support more complex mission capabilities with this robustness in mind. A significant addition was the integration of the Linux operating system, which provides the flexibility to develop much more elaborate protection mechanisms within software, such as support for remote on-orbit …

Lyfi, Kianoosh Salami, Justin Cotton, Elush Shirazpour

Electrical Engineering

This paper will cover the steps necessary to design, build, and manage networkable smart light switches over WiFi via a mobile application. It contains a microcontroller running a real time operating system, a WiFi module, a Java server with SQLite databasing, and a mobile phone application.

LyFi is designed to turn on/off and dim household lights while only requiring the same installation procedure as a less capable dimmer switch. Once installed and connected to a network, LyFi will self-discover and configure. The server automatically propogates a database of nodes where any mobile device running an application can receive an updated …

Full Custom Vlsi Design Of On-Line Stability Checkers, Chris Y. Lee

Master's Theses

A stability checker is a clocked storage element, much like a flip-flop, which detects unstable and late signals in the pipeline of a digital system. The On-line stability checker operates concurrently with its associated circuit-under-test (CUT). This thesis describes the full custom very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design and testing process of On-Line Stability Checkers. The goals of this thesis are to construct and test Stability Checker designs, and to create a design template for future class projects in the EE 431 Computer-Aided Design (CAD) of VLSI Devices course at Cal Poly.

A method for concurrent fault testing called On-line Stability Checking …

Project 308: Augmented Reality Mario Kart, Joseph Abad, David Allender, Joryl Calizo, Ryan Gaspar, Gavin Lee

Computer Engineering

Mario Kart is a popular go-kart racing game developed by Nintendo. The premise of the game is simple: drive a go-kart along a racetrack and reach the finish line before the other players. What makes this game unique, however, is the inclusion of weapons, traps, and other projectiles that a player can use to gain an advantage in the race. We have taken on the challenge of not only recreating this amazing game, but using the art of Augmented Reality to fully immerse the player in the full experience. Rather than play the game on a television screen with a …

Increasing Efficiency In Boundary Security With Wireless Sensor Networks And Geospatial Information Systems Using Homology Theory, Luis Berumen^, Eric Chaidez^, Hamide Dogan*, Jose Gerardo Rosiles**

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2011

As part of an institutional investigation, we attempt to address the challenges the US customs and Border protection agency faces in the El Paso region. Our research focuses on defining a system for the surveillance application, and the use of mathematical models employed to achieve a greater efficiency of such architecture. With the use of the defined system, we apply homology theory through the algebraic process of topology, to accomplish an independent coordinate-free based system, which covers the surveillance area, with lesser quantity of sensor nodes. Our architecture makes the use of an operating system for wireless sensor networks; TinyOS, …

Dynamic Polymorphic Reconfiguration To Effectively “Cloak” A Circuit’S Function, Jeffrey L. Falkinburg

Theses and Dissertations

Today's society has become more dependent on the integrity and protection of digital information used in daily transactions resulting in an ever increasing need for information security. Additionally, the need for faster and more secure cryptographic algorithms to provide this information security has become paramount. Hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms provide the necessary increase in throughput, but at a cost of leaking critical information. Side Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks allow an attacker to exploit the regular and predictable power signatures leaked by cryptographic functions used in algorithms such as RSA. In this research the focus on a means to counteract …

Asynchronous Mips Processors: Educational Simulations, Robert L. Webb

Master's Theses

The system clock has been omnipresent in most mainstream chip designs. While simplifying many design problems the clock has caused the problems of clock skew, high power consumption, electromagnetic interference, and worst-case performance. In recent years, as the timing constraints of synchronous designs have been squeezed ever tighter, the efficiencies of asynchronous designs have become more attractive. By removing the clock, these issues can be mitigated. How- ever, asynchronous designs are generally more complex and difficult to debug. In this paper I discuss the advantages of asynchronous processors and the specifics of some asynchronous designs, outline the roadblocks to asynchronous …

Where Does Your Institution Stand?, Wendell Brase, Mark Askren

Information Technology Services: Publications

Media coverage of sustainability and "green" issues is hard to ignore these days. But less clear is a specific understanding of what this agenda means within higher ed IT organizations. For starters, it's useful to self-assess whether your campus is a leading innovator on all things "green" or satisfied to remain inconspicuous in the middle of the pack. If your institution is trailing but wants to assert a leadership role in environmental stewardship, you need to get engaged to understand what it will take to catch up and how IT can be a leader, not just a contributor, to such …

An Empirical Comparison Of Area-Universal And Other Parallel Computing Networks, Ronald I. Greenberg, Lee Guan

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper provides empirical comparison of the communication capabilities of two area-universal networks, the fat-tree and the fat-pyramid, to the popular mesh and hypercube networks for parallel computation. While area-universal networks have been proven capable of simulating, with modest slowdown, any computation of any other network of comparable area, prior work has generally left open the question of how area-universal networks compare to other networks in practice. Comparisons are performed using techniques of throughput and latency analysis that have previously been applied to k-ary n-cube networks and using various existing models to equate the hardware cost of the networks being …

A Systolic Simulation And Transformation System, Ronald I. Greenberg, H.-C. Oh

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper presents a CAD tool, SystSim, to ease the design of systolic systems. Given a high-level, functional description of processors, and a high-level description of their interconnection, SystSim will perform simulations and provide graphical output. SystSim will also perform transformations such as retiming, which eases use of the methodology of Leiserson and Saxe of designing a system with broadcasting and then obtaining a systolic system through retiming.

Randomized Routing On Fat-Trees, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fat-trees are a class of routing networks for hardware-efficient parallel computation. This paper presents a randomized algorithm for routing messages on a fat-tree. The quality of the algorithm is measured in terms of the load factor of a set of messages to be routed, which is a lower bound on the time required to deliver the messages. We show that if a set of messages has load factor lambda on a fat-tree with n processors, the number of delivery cycles (routing attempts) that the algorithm requires is O(lambda+lgnlglgn) with probability 1-O(1/ …