Microprogramming and microprocessors in the Netherlands

This paper gives a short survey of the activities in the field of microprocessors and microprogramming in the Netherlands. In the first part of it the activies within the Universities and non commercial institutes are mentioned. The second part deals with the industrial activity. The author is aware of the incompleteness of the survey. The reason for it is twofold. First; Some of the activies, especially in the industrie, have confidential aspects. The information may not yet appear in a paper like this. Second; He is not aware of all activities carried out in the field. A list of names of the institutes etcand eventual contactpersons is included. A literature list is not added, because not much literature is available now

Daily weather direct readout microprocessor study

The work completed included a study of the requirements and hardware and software implementation techniques for NIMBUS ESMR and TWERLE direct readout applications using microprocessors. Many microprocessors were studied for this application. Because of the available Interdata development capabilities, it was concluded that future implementations be on an Interdata microprocessor which was found adequate for the task

Statistical Reliability Estimation of Microprocessor-Based Systems

What is the probability that the execution state of a given microprocessor running a given application is correct, in a certain working environment with a given soft-error rate? Trying to answer this question using fault injection can be very expensive and time consuming. This paper proposes the baseline for a new methodology, based on microprocessor error probability profiling, that aims at estimating fault injection results without the need of a typical fault injection setup. The proposed methodology is based on two main ideas: a one-time fault-injection analysis of the microprocessor architecture to characterize the probability of successful execution of each of its instructions in presence of a soft-error, and a static and very fast analysis of the control and data flow of the target software application to compute its probability of success. The presented work goes beyond the dependability evaluation problem; it also has the potential to become the backbone for new tools able to help engineers to choose the best hardware and software architecture to structurally maximize the probability of a correct execution of the target softwar

On-Line Instruction-checking in Pipelined Microprocessors

Microprocessors performances have increased by more than five orders of magnitude in the last three decades. As technology scales down, these components become inherently unreliable posing major design and test challenges. This paper proposes an instruction-checking architecture to detect erroneous instruction executions caused by both permanent and transient errors in the internal logic of a microprocessor. Monitoring the correct activation sequence of a set of predefined microprocessor control/status signals allow distinguishing between correctly and not correctly executed instruction

EXFI: a low cost Fault Injection System for embedded Microprocessor-based Boards

Evaluating the faulty behavior of low-cost embedded microprocessor-based boards is an increasingly important issue, due to their adoption in many safety critical systems. The architecture of a complete Fault Injection environment is proposed, integrating a module for generating a collapsed list of faults, and another for performing their injection and gathering the results. To address this issue, the paper describes a software-implemented Fault Injection approach based on the Trace Exception Mode available in most microprocessors. The authors describe EXFI, a prototypical system implementing the approach, and provide data about some sample benchmark applications. The main advantages of EXFI are the low cost, the good portability, and the high efficienc

Fault Injection for Embedded Microprocessor-based Systems

Microprocessor-based embedded systems are increasingly used to control safety-critical systems (e.g., air and railway traffic control, nuclear plant control, aircraft and car control). In this case, fault tolerance mechanisms are introduced at the hardware and software level. Debugging and verifying the correct design and implementation of these mechanisms ask for effective environments, and Fault Injection represents a viable solution for their implementation. In this paper we present a Fault Injection environment, named FlexFI, suitable to assess the correctness of the design and implementation of the hardware and software mechanisms existing in embedded microprocessor-based systems, and to compute the fault coverage they provide. The paper describes and analyzes different solutions for implementing the most critical modules, which differ in terms of cost, speed, and intrusiveness in the original system behavio

Ubiquitous computing: Anytime, anyplace, anywhere?

Computers are ubiquitous, in terms that they are everywhere, but does this mean the same as ubiquitous computing? Views are divided. The convergent device (one-does-all) view posits the computer as a tool through which anything, and indeed everything, can be done (Licklider & Taylor, 1968). The divergent device (many-do-all) view, by contrast, offers a world where microprocessors are embedded in everything and communicating with one another (Weiser, 1991). This debate is implicitly present in this issue, with examples of the convergent device in Crook & Barrowcliff's paper and in Gay et al's paper, and examples of the divergent devices in Thomas & Gellersen's paper and Baber's paper. I suspect both streams of technology are likely to co-exist

The AXIOM software layers

AXIOM project aims at developing a heterogeneous computing board (SMP-FPGA).The Software Layers developed at the AXIOM project are explained.OmpSs provides an easy way to execute heterogeneous codes in multiple cores. People and objects will soon share the same digital network for information exchange in a world named as the age of the cyber-physical systems. The general expectation is that people and systems will interact in real-time. This poses pressure onto systems design to support increasing demands on computational power, while keeping a low power envelop. Additionally, modular scaling and easy programmability are also important to ensure these systems to become widespread. The whole set of expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed.The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) will research new hardware/software architectures for cyber-physical systems to meet such expectations. The technical approach aims at solving fundamental problems to enable easy programmability of heterogeneous multi-core multi-board systems. AXIOM proposes the use of the task-based OmpSs programming model, leveraging low-level communication interfaces provided by the hardware. Modular scalability will be possible thanks to a fast interconnect embedded into each module. To this aim, an innovative ARM and FPGA-based board will be designed, with enhanced capabilities for interfacing with the physical world. Its effectiveness will be demonstrated with key scenarios such as Smart Video-Surveillance and Smart Living/Home (domotics).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft