Enabling Standalone Operation
From iis-projects
A key feature of our biomedical acquisition and processing platform is standalone operation: The system must be able to provide all required supply voltages and clock frequencies without external components in order to use it in wearable and even implantable in-vivo applications. Furthermore, the three involved uControllers (PULP, pulpino and a commercial radio SoC) must load their program code (that must also be up-gradable) from non-volatile storage at startup once all supplies and clocks are ready. The commercial radio SoC has integrated flash memory for this purpose; our two own ASICs share the discrete multi-Gigabit NAND flash that is also used for data storage.
We have all the key requirements for standalone operation in place (programmable voltage converters, oscillators and boot loaders); in this project you are going to put them all together and create the missing control software/firmware. The goal is to demonstrate startup and operation of the platform with only a Li-ion battery connected.
In this thesis you will learn:
- Firmware management in multi-chip systems
- Details and challenges of bootloaders/boot binaries
- Startup and synchronization challenges in complex embedded systems
Status: Available
We are looking for 1-2 motivated Semester Thesis/Group Work students
Contact: Florian Glaser
Prerequisites
- Some experience with embedded/low level software
- Interest in embedded systems and uControllers
Character
- 20% Concept
- 40% Embedded software design
- 40% Experiments/Measurements
