About Me

Since 1 Nov. 2009 I am a Ph.D. student in the Embedded Systems Lab, at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University (LiU), Sweden. I am currently doing research in the area of HW/SW optimization of reconfigurable systems, under the supervision of Prof. Petru Eles and Prof. Zebo Peng. Previously, I have also did research in the area of fault-tolerant embedded systems, with a focus on error detection optimization.

I received the Diploma Engineer degree in 2009, from the Faculty of Automation and Computers, "Politehnica" University Timisoara, Romania.

Exjobb (Master Thesis) Proposals

HW Implementation of a Reconfiguration Controller for FPGA Configuration Prefetching

• Detailed description here [pdf].
• Project Goal
  The goal of this project is to design a hardware reconfiguration controller (manager), together with a set of API functions, that would support initialization, preemption and resumption of dynamic reconfigurations on a real Xilinx FPGA board.
  
• Requirements
  • Strong knowledge of hardware design concepts.
  • Knowledge of VHDL and/or Verilog.
  • Knowledge of the Xilinx FPGA architectures and tools – the Embedded Development Kit (EDK) and Integrated Software Environment (ISE) – represent an advantage.

Integrated Mapping and Configuration Prefetching for FPGAs

• Detailed description here [pdf].
• Project Goal
  The goal of this project is to develop a design tool that determines, at design time, what is the best mapping of hardware modules on an FPGA such that a prefetch policy will minimize the expected execution time of a given application. The evaluation of the developed algorithms and tools will be done using simulation.
  
• Requirements
  • Strong programming and algorithmic skills.
  • Knowledge of Matlab and C/C++ represent an advantage.
  • Knowledge of FPGA and hardware design concepts is not required, but may help.

Research

Research Interests

• HW/SW optimization of reconfigurable systems
  • FPGA configuration prefetching
• Fault-tolerant embedded systems
  • Error detection optimization

Project Description

• Our research is done in the context of reconfigurable embedded systems with applications to areas such as fault tolerance, performance of real-time systems etc. Our main objective is to develop a set of tools and design methodologies for the optimization of such systems. Since modern systems have high performance requirements, it is important to efficiently use the limited resources and obtain good solutions. In order to deal with this problem we try to leverage the advantages of HW-SW co-design, as well as using state-of-the-art reconfiguration techniques.

Motivation

• Modern systems need high performance as well as flexibility and adaptability. Dynamically reconfigurable systems (like FPGAs) provide both the performance of hardware acceleration and the flexibility and adaptability that modern applications require. Unfortunately, applying reconfiguration techniques in a straight-forward manner will generate solutions that are not feasible: either from the cost perspective, or from the performance point of view. Since both cost and performance are important issues for today's embedded systems, we need to develop design methodologies that facilitate us to trade-off cost and performance in order to finally use the available resources as efficiently as possible.

Teaching

• 2012 vt
  • Course assistant for System Design and Methodology (TDTS07)
  • Course assistant for Embedded Systems Design (TDDI08)
  • Course assistant for Computer Aided Design of Electronics (TDTS01)
• 2011 vt
  • Course assistant for System Design and Methodology (TDTS07)
  • Course assistant for Embedded Systems Design (TDDI08)
  • Course assistant for Computer Aided Design of Electronics (TDTS01)
• 2010 vt
  • Lab assistant for System Design and Methodology (TDTS07)
  • Course assistant for Embedded Systems Design (TDDI08)

Publications

• Performance Optimization of Error Detection Based on Speculative Reconfiguration
  Adrian Lifa, Petru Eles and Zebo Peng
  48th Design Automation Conference (DAC 2011), San Diego, CA, USA, June 5-10, 2011.
• Hardware/Software Optimization of Error Detection Implementation for Real-Time Embedded Systems
  Adrian Lifa, Petru Eles, Zebo Peng and Viacheslav Izosimov
  International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS 2010), part of the Embedded Systems Week, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, October 24-29, 2010.

Hobbies (or what keeps me going on*)

• Travelling -> my new gallery, old gallery.
• Sports: skiing, hiking, running, jumping rope, cycling, swimming, bungee-jumping (Vidraru Dam, Romania 2007, Rasnoavei Gorge, Romania 2008), sky-diving (tandem San Diego 2008, AFF 4 Vasteras 2010, first almost 4-way :D Vasteras 2010, my first speed star Vasteras 2010), climbing, squash, ping-pong, badminton, tennis, billiards.
• Reading, theater (especially comedies), opera (occasionally).