ESTACA Internship
Please find attached an offer of a master internship in the field of automotive embedded systems.
The internship will be held at ESTACA engineering school (Laval) with regular travels to ENSTA ParisTech to realize experimentation on the FPGA-platform.
Title: Design space exploration of an AUTOSAR-compliant system using FPGA platform
Description de la mission
AUTOSAR is now established as a world-wide standard for the development of E/E automotive systems. It provides concepts and methodology allowing the portability of software functions on the hardware architecture and their reuse. It defines a set of rules and interfaces to design, interconnect, deploy and configure a set of application software components (SWCs). This methodology is based on a model-driven development style. The software architecture as well as the ECU hardware and the network topology are modeled in a formal way. This is defined in a metamodel that supports the software development process from architecture up to integration.
However, designing a distributed embedded system according to AUTOSAR standard necessitates the configuration of hundreds of parameters and requires several software allocation decisions. Each decision may influence the system performance and also the development cost. This architectural complexity leads to a large design decision space which is difficult to be explored without using an analytical method or a design tool.
To address this problem, a design space exploration framework has been developed at our laboratory. It provides a fully automatic closed search enabling to evaluate and compare different design alternatives against performance constraints and optimization goals (response time, CPU load, network load and memory usage). This framework relies firstly on an analytical engine to measure the system performance metrics before to test on a real testbed platform, a set of best selected solutions. The main drawbacks of this approach are the bad precision while computing system performance metrics using analytical engine and the hard design of the testbed platform with inflexible configuration and evolution of the system.
To overcome these problems, a good compromise candidate to perform the design space exploration loop is the use of a FPGA platform with integrated NoC. This solution permits to synthetize precisely complex automotive functions a priori before to implement them on MCU-based platforms.
The objectives of this internship are:
* Bibliography on the design space exploration of embedded systems and AUTOSAR,
* Connect the design code of an AUTOSAR application to a FPGA-based platform (Xilinx Virtex-4)
* Use the existing design space exploration framework to optimize the system performance
* Validate the proposed methods on a real-life steering system.
Best regards,
Khaled CHAABAN
Assistant professor
Embedded systems group
www.estaca.fr