Energy-Efficient and Real-Time Embedded Systems
Prof. Peter Petrov
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| Dr. Peter Petrov |
Embedded systems are found in numerous applications in our everyday lives. Such systems are in the heart of our cell phones and audio and video players, control the engines and the brakes of our cars, are used in important medical products, and can easily be found in practically any modern technology. These systems are built using one or, more often, many microprocessors, and as such constitute very sophisticated computing and networked systems. The workings of these complex computer systems are hidden from the end user as he or she simply expects the described functionality; we want our cell phones to always be connected, to quickly process pictures and videos, and to stay alive as long as possible on their batteries.
The goal of this project is to make such systems extremely energy-efficient and responsive, while providing a significant computational power, comparable to our desktop systems. Such goals are important as many embedded systems rely on a limited supply of energy and need to quickly process and respond to external events within certain time limits. Embedded systems have been designed and built using technologies and infrastructures developed for general-purpose desktop and server computers. These systems are general-purpose as they are built to execute an arbitrary program and, for this reason, are usually optimized for good performance on average. In the world of the embedded systems, however, the application and its algorithmic implementation is typically designed in parallel with the hardware design. Consequently, the embedded processor architecture can be customized and fine-tuned to the needs of the particular application in order to achieve significant energy reductions, performance improvements, and responsiveness to events from the environment.
The underlying methodology followed in the project, is to design and develop a next-generation embedded processor architecture capable of dynamically customizing and fine-tuning itself to the requirements of the particular application. This customization technology is achieved trough the active cooperation and synergism between hardware architecture, operating system, and compiler design.
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