Modelling behavioural requirements and alignment with verification in the embedded industry

Formalising requirements has the potential to solve problems arising from deficiencies in natural language descriptions. While behavioural requirements are rarely described formally in industry, increasing complexity and new safety standards have renewed the interest in formal specifications. The goal of this paper is to explore how behavioural requirements for embedded systems can be formalised and aligned with verification tasks. Over the course of a 2.5-year project with industry, we modelled existing requirements from a safety-critical automotive software function in several iterations. Taking practical limitations and stakeholder preferences into account, we explored the use of models on different abstraction levels. The final model was used to generate test cases and was evaluated in three interviews with relevant industry practitioners. We conclude that models on a high level of abstraction are most suitable for industrial requirements engineering, especially when they need to be interpreted by other stakeholders

Phosphorous doping from APCVD deposited PSG

The phosphorous diffusion from atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) deposited phosphorus silicate glass (PSG) promises reduced process costs compared to the standard POCl3 diffusion process, since no POCl3 gas flow is necessary during the diffusion process. Therefore, much smaller or no spacing between the wafers is necessary and the throughput of the diffusion process can be significantly increased. Furthermore, it allows a structuring of the doping source prior to diffusion. We investigate the effect of basic process parameters concerning the deposition of the PSG and the capping layer on sheet resistance and uniformity. On standard aluminum back surface field (Al-BSF) solar cells, cell efficiencies of up to 19.6 % were achieved. In a high temperature co-diffusion process with reduced P content, the APCVD-PSG emitter passivated with fired PECVD-SiNX features low j0E of 100 fA/cm² at 50 Ω/sq. This results in a high cell VOC of 639 mV while leading to a jSC loss due to increased Auger recombination in the deep emitter profile. This loss can partly be compensated by a selective emitter etch-back. It would not occur, when the doping profile is located at the rear side of a bifacial or back contact solar cell as a BSF.publishe

Managing Traceability Information Models: Not Such a Simple Task After All?

Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus their work on these practical problems

VEDLIoT. Next generation accelerated AIoT systems and applications

Mika K, Griessl R, Kucza N, et al. VEDLIoT. Next generation accelerated AIoT systems and applications. In: CF '23: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers. New York, NY: ACM; 2023: 291-296

VEDLIoT: Very Efficient Deep Learning in IoT

Kaiser M, Griessl R, Kucza N, et al. VEDLIoT: Very Efficient Deep Learning in IoT. In: Institut of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), ed. DATE '22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference & Exhibition on Design, Automation & Test in Europe. Leuven: European Design and Automation Association; 2022: 963-968