RESEARCH GROUP: VeCAD Research Group works on high performance VLSI design and FPGA implementation. Besides that, we also research new methodologies for Digital System, such as verification and test techniques. We have accessibility to industrial tools of Mentor Graphics, Cadence and Synopsis. Researchers will have opportunity to master these tools, which is a good preparation before working in industry.
RESEARCH TOPIC: A DEPENDABLE SYSTEM-ON-CHIP ARCHITECTURE FOR IMAGE PROCESSING
ABSTRACT: The popularity of alternative medicine is growing rapidly because it involves non-invasive medical diagnostic methods that cause minimal side effect and injury to the human. Some of these diagnostic methods involve collection of signals such as wrist pulse, heart signal, brain activities and images of human’s organs such as eyes and tongue. Several research works have been focusing on algorithm development to process those signals.
The implementation is run purely in software by a powerful processor. Longer computation time is needed when complicated analysis is needed. Thus, implementing the signal processing such as image processing algorithm in both hardware and software is the better solution to boost the performance. Furthermore, a portable diagnostic device is possible when all the functions are integrated into a single chip where the whole system is called system-on-chip.
Most of the diagnostic system involves a lot of image processing. Thus, switching activities are huge and wear-out or aging process takes place. This problem is exacerbated by the growing semiconductor integration. Therefore, the dependability of a system-on-chip must be taken care of. Online testing or in-field testing is a testing that is performed to check the health of a system-on-chip even during its usage. This feature should be included in the device especially those life-critical system such that precaution could be taken before the system breakdown during its urgent usage.
This research proposes development of a dependable system-on-chip for tongue diagnostic image processing. Tongue diagnosis is chosen because the system-on-chip for tongue diagnosis is identified as unprecedented. Top down design method from system level to register transfer level is used. We expect to complete the prototype using FPGA for the dependable system-on-chip of tongue diagnostic image processing which works correctly and has small performance overheads coming from online testing feature.
On a week-to-week basis, you will be expected to list the main tasks associated with this research topic and summarize the progress.
MONTHLY STIPEND: RM 2050 per month (subject to semesterly performance)
Duration: Minimum 3 years
Ph.D Scholarship - A dependable system-on-chip architecture for image processing
