Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures emerged as a viable solution for the design of manycore embedded systems of the next generation. While bringing new opportunities and effective energy/performance tradeoffs, they also introduce new challenges: the design of NoC based systems involves several aspects, such as the partitioning and mapping of the application to the cores, the selection of an appropriate interconnection topology, together with an appropriate routing scheme for dispatching the packets among the nodes.
The assessment of NoC based systems by performing a low-level (e.g., RTL) simulation evaluation and/or a full system simulation of the whole NoC architecture, is an extremely time-consuming approach that makes unfeasible an exhaustive exploration of all the design alternatives. High level cycle-accurate NoC simulators are widely used to quickly get an estimation of the target requirements/objectives. However, they rely on the use of synthetic traffic patterns, characterized by specific statistical properties only (e.g., packet injection rate) and do not accurately model other important aspects of real traffic scenarios.
To overcome such limitations, different benchmark suites (e.g., PARSEC, SPLASH) were proposed with the aim of including a set of applications representative of new emerging workloads for massively parallel architectures. Nevertheless, they still assume a traditional shared memory mechanism, while a message passing mechanism based on the direct exchange of data packets between nodes would probably be a more appropriate and scalable choice for next generation NoCs.
This talk describes the experience and the challenges of developing an entire design flow that, starting from a single and slow traditional shared-memory full system simulation, allows a fast and multi-objective evaluation of real applications on several different NoCs using message passing.
Tailoring machine learning to textile embedded robotics
By their nature (i) soft robotics and (ii) wearable technology have many things in common. Both offer the opportunity for close contact with humans, in a naturalistic way -- wearable technology based on fabrics is closer to ordinary clothing, while soft robotics promise safety for ever closer human-robot interaction. However, from a robotic engineering standpoint, both also suffer from challenges in design, modelling and control. The materials and methods used in fabrication do not lend themselves well to traditional engineering approaches of signal processing or system identification due to high noise levels, unpredictable deformations and imprecise knowledge of the physical parameters. To start to address these challenges, the Robot Learning Lab at King's has been looking into the how to measure and understand human behaviour through the medium of textile-based sensors, in combination with statistical learning approaches. I will give an overview of our activities in this area, from our initial experiences working with textile craftspeople, to our latest activities bringing low-cost prosthetics to the developing world.
This talk, entitled "Developing flexible, washable and robust circuit demonstrators for yarn encapsulation and e-textile industrial applications", presents about the challenges of encapsulating flexible copper electrodes with PDMS material.
Title: Research challenges for power electronics
Abstract: In this seminar I’ll discuss three top-level research challenges that we are currently working on at Bristol: getting power from horrible sources, sorting out horrible waveforms, and avoiding horrible death (of power devices). Hopefully this will trigger some discussion!
This talk describes the fabrication of solar energy cells on fabrics. These photovoltaic cells are design to exploit to the flexibilty of fabrics and to make them useful for e-textiles.
Challenges for Inductive Power Transfer over wider areas
Inductive power transfer (IPT) is now a commercially mature technology for short range, localised powering of electronic devices. However, there are many potential applications that would be enabled by a power transfer system tolerant of greater separation between transmitter and receiver. In this talk we consider just such an application and elucidate the design and performance constraints facing poor and variably coupled IPT systems.
Title: The good, the bad and the porous: a review of carbonaceous materials for flexible supercapacitor applications
Abstract: The integration of electronics into textiles offers unique and promising opportunities for wearable technologies. Already, the integration of energy harvesters (from ferroelectric to photovoltaic) and sensors have been widely demonstrated in medical and defense applications. However, the problem of reliable power management has not been as readily solved. With high power densities, fast charge-discharge rates and long lifetimes, flexible supercapacitors are seen as a promising energy storage technology for future e-textiles. The design possibilities for these devices are complex and varied, with a myriad of materials and configurations possible. This work will introduce and critique the current state-of-the-art electrode materials for flexible supercapacitors. The use of carbon within electric double-layer supercapacitors and pseudocapacitors will be discussed. It is envisaged that this paper will provide an overview to the current challenges in the field of flexible supercapacitors, and highlight the future possibilities of carbon as an electrode material; providing a useful guide to those new to the field, or as an up-to-date reference material for the more experienced researcher.
Context: This conference talk will be presented at the 4th Annual Energy Storage and its Applications CDT Conference. It will be to an audience of energy storage specialists who are not experienced in e-textiles and I will be presenting in the materials for energy storage session.