Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.

Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.

While the earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling algorithm has extensively been utilized in real-time systems, there is almost no literature considering EDF for task sets with dynamic self-suspension behavior. To be precise, there is no specialized result for uniprocessor systems, besides the trivial suspension-oblivious approach. The work by Liu and Anderson (in ECRTS 2013) and Dong and Liu (in

In this article, we present a layer-wise refinement method for neural network output range analysis. While approaches such as nonlinear programming (NLP) can directly model the high nonlinearity brought by neural networks in output range analysis, they are known to be difficult to solve in general. We propose to use a convex polygonal relaxation (overapproximation) of the activation functions to cope

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.

Many power management algorithms demand accurate and fine-grained runtime estimations of dynamic core power. In the absence of fine-grained power sensors, model-based estimations are needed. Such power models commonly approximate the switching activity of logic gates using performance counters while assuming a linear performance counter/power relation at a fixed frequency and voltage. It has been shown

Code-reuse attack is a severe threat to computer systems as it can circumvent many existing security defenses and perform arbitrary behavior. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is a security technique that restricts control-flow transfers to prevent the attack. Although CFI has been implemented via various methods, including hardware-assisted extensions, the current designs of hardware-assisted fine-grained

Power gating is effective for networks-on-chip (NoCs) to reduce the excessive leakage power dissipated by idle network components. Most existing NoC power-gating approaches rely on the routing algorithms to mitigate the power-gating blocking latency problem. When the network becomes faulty and fault-tolerant routing algorithms are applied, these approaches are no longer applicable or can seriously

Predictive analytics using the time-series data collected from various types of sensors is a fundamental task that enables diverse mobile and Internet of Things applications including smart health. Deep-learning-based solutions are increasingly employed to solve such tasks because of their ability to directly process raw sensor data to achieve high accuracy as opposed to using human-engineered features

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) excel in low power and high throughput computations, but they are challenging to program. Traditionally, developers rely on hardware description languages, such as Verilog or VHDL to specify the hardware behavior at the register-transfer level. High-level synthesis (HLS) raises the level of abstraction but still requires FPGA design knowledge. Programmers usually

Distributed reactive synthesis is the problem of algorithmically constructing controllers of distributed, communicating systems so that each closed-loop system satisfies a given temporal specification. We present an algorithm, called negotiation , for sound (but necessarily incomplete) distributed reactive synthesis based on assume–guarantee decompositions. The negotiation algorithm iteratively constructs

Automated controller synthesis methods for cyber–physical systems (CPSs) often require precise knowledge of the system’s state. Unfortunately, parts of the state may not be directly measurable, which limits the application of these methods. We present a design methodology for the co-design of software controllers and the required sensing capabilities. Our method leverages the knowledge of physical

NAND flash storage has become a standard choice in consumer electronics and is gaining popularity in enterprise systems due to its superior performance and low-power consumption. While its cost disadvantage is rapidly fading thanks to multibit cell technologies and 3-D stacking architectures, the challenge of limited endurance is still lingering and is expected to become more daunting as bits-per-cell

Deep learning techniques have enjoyed wide adoption in real life, including in various safety-critical embedded applications. While neural network computations require protection against hardware errors, the substantial overheads of conventional error-tolerance techniques limit their use on embedded platforms, which carry out demanding deep neural network computations with limited resources. The utilization

Mobile devices today often have multiple applications running simultaneously in the background. These background applications could rapidly consume storage cache resources, thus degrading the performance of foreground applications as well as the user experience. This issue could get worse as modern mobile devices are employing universal flash storage (UFS), which supports faster transmission speed

As a means to thwart thermal covert channel attack in a multi-/many-core system, a strong heat noise whose frequency band coincides with that occupied by the thermal covert channel is injected to jam the channel. However, this undiscriminating channel jamming-based countermeasure will fail if a thermal covert channel is allowed to change its transmission frequency dynamically in response to the jamming

Runtime monitoring is a vital part of safety-critical systems. However, early stage assurance of monitoring quality is currently limited: it relies either on complex models that might be inaccurate in unknown ways or on data that would only be available once the system has been built. To address this issue, we propose a compositional framework for modeling and analysis of noisy monitoring systems.

Coarse-grain reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) are emerging accelerators that promise low-power acceleration of compute-intensive loops in applications. The acceleration achieved by CGRA relies on the efficient mapping of the compute-intensive loops by the CGRA compiler, onto the CGRA architecture. The CGRA mapping problem, being NP-complete, is performed in a two-step process, namely, scheduling and mapping

In today’s information-driven world, data access latency accounts for the expensive part of processing user requests. One potential solution to access latency is prefetching, a technique to speculate and move future requests closer to the processing unit. However, the block access requests received by the storage device show poor spatial locality because most file-related locality is absorbed in the

Multiprocessor systems are increasingly deployed in real-time applications, where reliability, energy consumption, and makespan are often the main scheduling objectives. In this work, we investigate the dynamic scheduling of tasks modeled by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), which is an NP-hard problem with all existing methods being heuristics. Our contributions have two steps: 1) assuming that the

Heterogeneous SoC platforms, comprising both general purpose CPUs and accelerators, such as a GPU, are becoming increasingly attractive for real-time and mixed-criticality systems to cope with the computational demand of data parallel applications. However, contention for access to shared main memory can lead to significant performance degradation on both CPU and GPU. Existing work has shown that memory

Power and energy consumption are the key optimization goals in all modern processors. Negative capacitance field-effect transistors (NCFETs) are a leading emerging technology that promises outstanding performance in addition to better energy efficiency. The thickness of the added ferroelectric layer as well as frequency and voltage are the key parameters that impact the power and energy of NCFET-based

Electrocardiogram (ECG) biometric authentication (EBA) is a promising approach for human identification, particularly in consumer devices, due to the individualized, ubiquitous, and easily identifiable nature of ECG signals. Thus, computing architectures for EBA must be accurate, fast, energy efficient, and secure. In this article, first, we implement an EBA algorithm to achieve 100% accuracy in user

The demand bound function (DBF) is a powerful abstraction to analyze the feasibility/schedulability of real-time tasks. Computing the DBF for expressive system models, such as graph-based tasks, is typically very expensive. In this article, we develop new techniques to drastically improve the DBF computation efficiency for a representative graph-based task model, digraph real-time tasks (DRT). First

Return-oriented programming (ROP) is a prevalent code reuse technique that hijacks a program’s control flow by modifying its return addresses on the stack. Researchers have proposed some return address verification methods by using the message authentication code (MAC). But these approaches suffer from high performance overhead. In this article, we first propose Dislocated Stack, a new kind of stack

The state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) structures present growing irregularity in the sense of layer connections, which derives from the innovative manual designs and the recently proposed neural architecture searching approaches. Such irregular structures improve recognition accuracy, but also bring challenges for hardware deployment, especially on CNN accelerators with regular architectures:

Embedded systems are increasingly interconnected in the emerging application scenarios. Many of these applications are safety critical, making it a high priority to ensure that the systems are free from malicious attacks. This work aims to detect vulnerabilities, that could be exploited by adversaries to compromise functional correctness, in the embedded firmware, which is challenging especially due

Nowadays, driven by the needs of autonomous driving and edge intelligence, integrated CPU/GPU heterogeneous platform has gained significant attention from both academia and industry. As the representative series, NVIDIA Jetson family perform well in terms of computation capability, power consumption, and mobile size. Even so, the integrated heterogeneous platform only contains one limited physical

This work aims to enable on-device training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by reducing the computation cost at training time. CNN models are usually trained on high-performance computers and only the trained models are deployed to edge devices. But the statically trained model cannot adapt dynamically in a real environment and may result in low accuracy for new inputs. On-device training by

This article focuses on designing an energy-efficient image recognition system for marine monitoring. One of the main challenges of an underwater imaging system is the strict power consumption constraints due to the limited on-site resources. Considering the need for continuous operation in different water turbidity levels and background illumination conditions, an energy-efficient approach is needed

3-D NAND flash has become the mainstream in modern SSD designs because it offers superior bit storage density. However, while enjoying the large capacity, 3-D NAND flash is highly prone to bit errors due to its cylindrical cell structure. Modern SSDs employ the low-density parity-check (LDPC) error-correcting code to manage bit errors in 3-D NAND flash. Strong LDPC error correction is subject to a

Current peripheral execution approaches for intermittently powered systems require full access to the internal hardware state for checkpointing or rely on application-level energy estimation for task partitioning to make correct forward progress. Both requirements present significant practical challenges for energy-harvesting, intelligent edge Internet-of-Things devices, which perform hardware-accelerated

As we connect more microcontrollers to the Internet and employ them to control the physical world around us, their reliability and security are increasingly important. Many microcontrollers provide limited facilities for hardware isolation, and real-time OSes offer custom APIs, that require coupling applications into the ecosystem and abstractions of that specific OS to leverage isolation. This article

Industrial automation traditionally relies on local controllers implemented on microcontrollers or programmable logic controllers. With the emergence of edge computing, however, industrial automation evolves into a distributed two-tier computing architecture comprising local controllers and edge servers that communicate over wireless networks. Compared to local controllers, edge servers provide larger

We demonstrate a novel technique that employs transistor short-term aging effects in integrated circuits (ICs) to detect hardware Trojans in embedded systems. In advanced technology nodes (≤ 45 nm), voltage scaling in combination with short-term aging opens doors for short-term degradations. The induced short-term degradations result in dynamic variation of delays along various paths within the IC

A digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) enables miniaturization of immunoassays, point-of-care clinical diagnostics, and DNA sequencing. A recent generation of DMFBs uses a micro-electrode-dot-array (MEDA) architecture, which provides fine-grained control of droplets and real-time droplet sensing using the CMOS technology. However, microelectrodes in a MEDA biochip degrade when they are charged and discharged

Dynamic binary translation (DBT) requires the implementation of load-link/store-conditional (LL/SC) primitives for guest systems that rely on this form of synchronization. When targeting, e.g., $\times 86$ host systems, LL/SC guest instructions are typically emulated using atomic compare-and-swap (CAS) instructions on the host. Whilst this direct mapping is efficient, this approach is problematic due

The performance of resilient state estimators developed for cyber-physical systems (CPSs) decreases as the number of compromised sensors of the system increases. Furthermore, some of these algorithms leverage computationally expensive optimization techniques to incorporate resiliency. As such, we propose a fast resilient distributed state estimator (FRDSE), which is a novel resilient distributed algorithm

Intrinsic physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which derive hardware identifiers from components already present in a system without modification, are an appealing way to add a layer of hardware rooted security into a system. This is evidenced by the fact that the majority of PUF designs in commercial use today are intrinsic. However, as each intrinsic PUF design is reliant on specific hardware their

Application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs) utilize customized instructions to speedup a specific application or a set of applications. Thus, ASIPs execute the application(s) faster and are energy efficient compared to general-purpose processors. State-of-the-art custom instruction design methods typically target small applications or kernels of an application, often demanding an instruction

Sparsity, as an intrinsic property of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has been widely employed for hardware acceleration, and many customized accelerators tailored for sparse weights or activations have been proposed in these years. However, the irregular sparse patterns introduced by both weights and activations are much more challenging for efficient computation. For example, due to the issues

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are gaining interest due to their event-driven processing which potentially consumes low-power/energy computations in hardware platforms while offering unsupervised learning capability due to the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule. However, state-of-the-art SNNs require a large memory footprint to achieve high accuracy, thereby making them difficult to be deployed

The increasing computational cost of deep neural network models limits the applicability of intelligent applications on resource-constrained edge devices. While a number of neural network pruning methods have been proposed to compress the models, prevailing approaches focus only on parametric operators (e.g., convolution), which may miss optimization opportunities. In this article, we present a novel

The current mobile applications have rapidly growing memory footprints, posing a great challenge for memory system design. Insufficient DRAM main memory will incur frequent data swaps between memory and storage, a process that hurts performance, consumes energy, and deteriorates the write endurance of typical flash storage devices. Alternately, a larger DRAM has higher leakage power and drains the

As the number of processing cores and associated threads in chip multiprocessors (CMPs) continues to scale out, on-chip memory access latency dominates application execution time due to increased data movement. Although tiled CMP architectures with distributed shared caches provide a scalable design, increased physical distance between requesting and responding cores has led to both increased on-chip

With the increasing number of computation nodes integrated in multi and many-core platforms, network-on-chips (NoCs) emerged as a new communication medium in systems-on-chips (SoCs). HopliteRT is a new NoC design that was recently proposed to address the needs of real-time systems whilst respecting the constraints of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms. In this article, we: 1) introduce

The performance monitoring unit (PMU) in multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) is at the heart of the latest measurement-based timing analysis techniques in critical embedded systems. In particular, hardware event monitors (HEMs) in the PMU are used as building blocks in the process of budgeting and verifying software timing by tracking and controlling access counts to shared resources. While the

The verification of hybrid systems is intrinsically hard, due to the continuous dynamics that leads to infinite search spaces. Therefore, research attempts focused on hybrid system falsification of a black-box model, a technique that aims at finding an input signal violating the desired temporal specification. Main falsification approaches are based on stochastic hill-climbing optimization, that tries

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are often used in mission-critical applications, requiring a critical criterion in flight time. Unfortunately, severe power fluctuations, caused by specific flight patterns, degrade the deliverable capacity of the battery and hamper the flight time. A common approach to mitigating power fluctuations is to employ a hybrid energy storage system using a Li-ion battery with

Today’s vehicles are complex distributed embedded systems that are increasingly being connected to various external systems. Unfortunately, this increased connectivity makes the vehicles vulnerable to security attacks that can be catastrophic. In this article, we present a novel intrusion detection system (IDS) called INDRA that utilizes a gated recurrent unit (GRU)-based recurrent autoencoder to detect

Energy harvesting promises to power billions of Internet-of-Things devices without being restricted by battery life. The energy output of harvesters is typically tiny and highly unstable, so the computing system must store program states into nonvolatile memory frequently to preserve the execution progress in the presence of frequent power failures. Task-based intermittent computing is a promising

Current multi/many-core systems spend large amounts of time and power transmitting data across on-chip interconnects. This problem is aggravated when data-intensive applications, such as machine learning and pattern recognition, are executed in these systems. Recent studies show that some data-intensive applications can tolerate modest errors, thus opening a new design dimension, namely, trading result

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools allow the generation of a large variety of hardware implementations from the same specification by setting different optimization directives. Each combination of HLS directives returns an implementation of the target application that is based on a particular microarchitecture. Designers are interested only in the subset of implementations that correspond to Pareto-optimal

Traditional learning-based approaches for runtime hardware Trojan (HT) detection require complex and expensive on-chip data acquisition frameworks, and thus incur high area and power overhead. To address these challenges, we propose to leverage the power correlation between the executing instructions of a microprocessor to establish a machine learning (ML)-based runtime HT detection framework, called

Size and weight limitations of low-earth orbit (LEO) small satellites make their operation rest on a fine balance between solar power infeed and power demands of communication technologies on board, buffered by on-board battery storage. As a result, the problem of planning battery-powered payload utilization together with intersatellite communication is extremely intricate. Nevertheless, there is a

Multicore architectures are widely adopted in the emerging real-time applications, such as autonomous vehicles and robotics, where latency is required to be both bounded in the worst case (i.e., time predictability) and low. With the number of processors growing, the conventional memory interconnects, i.e., shared bus, crossbar, and network-on-chip (NoC), suffer high latency due to the increasing logic

Hardware accelerators are increasingly employed in conjunction with general-purpose processors to meet stringent performance constraints. In these heterogeneous systems, security has become a prime concern. In this article, we present a design approach to generate platform-independent secure multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoC) from a high-level abstraction. The aim of this article is to simplify

Shape expressions (SEs) is a novel specification language that was recently introduced to express behavioral patterns over real-valued signals observed during the execution of cyber-physical systems. An SE is a regular expression composed of arbitrary parameterized shapes, such as lines, exponential curves, and sinusoids as atomic symbols with symbolic constraints on the shape parameters. SEs enable