Prof. Carloni wins NSF CAREER award to study communication-based design methodology for distributed embedded systems
12/19/2006
Professor Luca Carloni has been awarded a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) - Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to develop a new communication-based design methodology for distributed embedded systems.
The grant is titled "Integrating Control, Computation, and Communication - A Design Automation Flow for Distributed Embedded Systems". Steady advances in such enabling technologies as semiconductor circuits, wireless networking, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are making possible the design of complex distributed (networked) embedded systems that could benefit several application areas such as public infrastructure, industrial automation, automotive industry, and consumer electronics. However, the heterogeneous and distributed nature of many such systems requires design teams with a composite skill set spanning automatic control, communication networks, and hardware/software computational systems. Computer-aided design, a traditionally interdisciplinary research area, will be instrumental in making these systems feasible and in enhancing the productivity of the design process. The grant will allow the PI to develop new modeling techniques, optimization algorithms, ommunication protocols and interface processes that combined will yield a novel 'design automation flow for distributed embedded-control applications' such as automotive ``X-by-wire systems'' and integrated buildings. The goal is to enable the integrated design and validation of these systems while assisting the typically multidisciplinary engineering teams that are building them. Intermediate contributions include methods for the robust deployment of real-time embedded software on distributed architectures and for the synthesis of a distributed implementation of an embedded control application where performance requirements are met while the usage of communication and computational resources is well-balanced. The education plan is motivated by the belief that the academic curricula for both computer and electrical engineers need to be updated in order to overcome the artificial and historical boundaries among those disciplines in electrical engineering and computer science that lie at the core of embedded computing.