Student Projects#

You find here currently available and past student projects.

4 SWS project#

LED-based spectrometry for microplates#

Circuit design FPGA

Microplate is a standard tool for working with liquids in a laboratory. For autonomous measurements involving a measure-control loop it may be desirable to measure the changes in the liquids. For a low-cost measurement, LED-based spectrometry may be used. Example works are: 1, 2.

For the measurements, an RGB LED will shed a light on a single well and the reflected waves will be measured by a digital color sensor (e.g., VEML3328). Microplates can have thousands of wells, and the solution should show the feasibility for at least 96-well plates. To allow parallel measurement, an FPGA will be used instead of a microcontroller.

Work packages#

TODO

Autonomous charging for TurtleBot 3#

ROS 3d design Circuit design

An autonomous charging system for TurtleBot 3 Waffle Pi will be designed. Currently the robot’s battery must be detached for charging.

Partial solutions and ideas exist (1, 2, 3, but not a complete solution for the Turtlebot3 Waffle Pi based on ROS2.

Work packages#

TODO

Masters theses#

Most of the projects are designed to be done as a masters thesis but the workload and work can still be adjusted to fit the requirements of a bachelors thesis or simple project work.

Parity-based error detection for digital circuits using Yosys#

FPGA reliability open source

Local triple modular redundancy (LTMR) is often the first choice to harden the flip-flops of an application against radiation-induced bitflips in space, but LTMR leads to an area overhead of roughly 300%. To cope with this significant overhead, an error detection based approach can be used [1]. To compare parity-based error detection with LTMR a tool for automatic application of these two approaches is needed.

Yosys is an open source synthesizer for digital logic. There is already a tool for applying LTMR based on Yosys [2].

Work packages#

  • Implementation of parity-based error detection using Yosys

  • Comparing the two approaches on a basic circuit regarding (1) maximum frequency, (2) area overhead and (3) processing time.

  • (stretch) Application and comparison on the RISC-V architecture.

Characterization of an HBM2-based FPGA accelerator#

FPGA parallel computing high bandwidth memory

Like GPUs, FPGA-based accelerators are used to improve processed data per Watt in data centers. Typically memory infrastructure on an FPGA is limited. To overcome this limit, high bandwidth memory (HBM) based FPGA accelerators emerged to increase the data throughput to the FPGA.

Work packages#

  • Literature research about (1) HBM memory based applications

  • Analysis of the AMD Xilinx Alveo U280 accelerator architecture to find out for which applications the HBM-based architecture is energy-efficient (characterization)

  • Implementation of an example application and comparison with its CPU-based counterpart.

Work packages#

Comparison of Burrows Wheeler transformation on various computer architectures#

FPGA algorithms heterogeneous computing

Sequencing is the process of decoding gene information for medical diagnostics and biomedical research. Recent massive parallel sequencing[3] techniques dramatically decreased the time and the costs involved in sequencing in last years, and paved the way for unprecedented medical diagnostics and prevention, e.g., for cancer patients.

Efficient computing of the work steps in the sequencing pipeline is beneficial to get results in a short time and in an energy-efficient way.

Sequence alignment is one of the steps in a sequencing pipeline. One of the popular algorithms used in sequence alignment is the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT).

In this project we want to compare BWT on different computing architectures. Some examples are:

  • Single-core processor

  • Multi-core processor

  • Two Multi-core processors connected on a mainboard

  • With GPU acceleration (e.g., Nvidia Tesla M60)

  • with FPGA acceleration on Alveo U280

Work packages#

  • literature research

    • available BWT software

    • computing platforms and results

  • preparation of BWT input datasets

  • implementation of BWT on Alveo U280

  • experiments

  • evaluation of

    • performance per Watt

    • runtime

    • quality of results

  • (stretch) heterogeneous computing: integration of the FPGA-based implementation in existing sequencing software

Past#

2022#

Master Theses#

  • Hardware- and Vendor-independent Test Framework for the PCIe Interface, by Ali Sılak, at Congatec GmbH

2021#

Master Theses#

  • Acceleration of Gaussian Elimination Algorithm on an FPGA, Amir Poorsadeg Zadeh Yeganeh

  • Investigating 2D SLAM algorithms in CPU-only Computing and GPU-accelerated Computing, Mohammed Aws, at BEC GmbH

  • Evaluation of state-of-the-art 3D feature descriptors for graph-based SLAM with LiDAR sensors, Hamit Zor, at Blickfeld GmbH

  • Development and Evaluation of a Computer Program for Clinical Assessment of Gene Mutation Data, Johanna Fenzl, at Deggendorf Institute of Pathology and Molecular Pathology