Luca Fanucci

• University of Pisa

Field Programmable Gate Arrays are extensively utilized across numerous domains, including telecommunications, cryptography, Machine Learning, and safety-critical applications. In critical applications, FPGAs are often exposed to environmental challenges, such as Single Event Upsets, which can affect the reliability of the design. Therefore, assess...

Field Programmable Gate Arrays find extensive use across various domains, ranging from telecommunications to Machine Learning tasks. In the context of space applications, they emerge as a highly favourable choice, owing to their high degree of flexibility and their accessibility in different silicon-grade technologies. However, due to the high asso...

Background: Medical expert systems (MES) proceed on a “knowledge base” of clinical variables linked together by a set of rules written by medical experts. The main goal of our multidisciplinary team of medical experts and knowledge, information engineers was to create an “intelligent telemedicine” able to improve outcomes through early detection of...

Advancements in technology have driven the miniaturization of embedded systems, making them more cost-effective and energy-efficient for wireless applications. As a result, the number of connectable devices in Internet of Things (IoT) networks has increased significantly, creating the challenge of linking them effectively and economically. The spac...

Operating a powered wheelchair involves significant risks and requires considerable cognitive effort to maintain effective awareness of the surrounding environment. Therefore, people with significant disabilities are at a higher risk, leading to a decrease in their social interactions, which can impact their overall health and well-being. Thus, we...

Neuromuscular diseases (NMDs), in their phenotypic heterogeneity, share quite invariably common issues that involve several clinical and socio-economical aspects, needing a deep critical analysis to develop better management strategies. From diagnosis to treatment and follow-up, the development of technological solutions can improve the detection o...

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have gained popularity in recent years. Among noninvasive BCIs, EEG-based systems stand out as the primary approach, utilizing the motor imagery (MI) paradigm to discern movement intentions. Initially, BCIs were predominantly focused on nonembedded systems. However, there is now a growing momentum towards shifting c...

Driving a motorized wheelchair is not without risk and requires high cognitive effort to obtain good environmental perception. Therefore, people with severe disabilities are at risk, potentially lowering their social engagement, and thus, affecting their overall well-being. Therefore, we designed a cooperative driving system for obstacle avoidance...

The emergence of the highly contagious coronavirus disease has led to multiple pandemic waves, resulting in a significant number of hospitalizations and fatalities. Even outside of hospitals, general practitioners have faced serious challenges, stretching their resources and putting themselves at risk of infection. Telemonitoring systems based on I...

The continuous technical advancement of scientific space missions has resulted in a surge in the amount of data that is transferred to ground stations within short satellite visibility windows, which has consequently led to higher throughput requirements for the hardware involved. To aid synchronization algorithms, the communication standards commo...

Latest technological improvements and investments from government agencies and private companies pushed to the limits the requirements related to both data rate speed and security of the communication links in space applications. The high volume of data and the continuous integration of services opened the path to hackers for new and increasingly d...

This paper presents a cycle-accurate verification environment for the Crypto-Tile, a cryptographic accelerator integrated into the EPI General Purpose Processor. The focus of this work is to provide a robust methodology for validating the functionality and performance of the Crypto-Tile. The verification environment includes an in-depth examination...

Driving a motorized wheelchair is not without risk and requires high cognitive effort to obtain a good environmental perception to complete tasks such as obstacle avoidance and path planning. Nonetheless, completely autonomous wheelchairs release the users from any cognitive and muscular effort, resulting in a progressive degradation of their resid...

In the last decades, the space sector has been the subject of significant technological improvements and investments from both government agencies and private companies, generating an increase in data rates and volumes of exchanged data. Accordingly, the security threats and the number of documented cyberattacks have grown. In order to meet the req...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). These electronic circuits possess several key characteristics such as unpredictability and uniqueness that make them particularly attractive for security applications. PUFs offer an appealing solution for secure boot applications, providing a hardware-based mecha...

In recent years, the number of Earth Observation missions has been exponentially increasing. Satellites dedicated to these missions usually embark with payloads that produce large amount of data and that need to be transmitted towards ground stations, in time-limited windows. Moreover, the noisy nature of the link between satellites and ground stat...

In the dynamic fields of semiconductor design and digital system development, effective verification procedures are in high demand. In particular, functional verification is essential for space systems to guarantee mission success, prevent errors in intricate environments, and uphold the reliability vital for effective space exploration. Testing ph...

This paper present GPU@SAT a general-purpose GPU-like IP-core fitted on a radiation-hardened FPGA, with the purpose of enabling AI applications onboard satellite.

This paper presents the implementation of a CCSDS 131.2-B receiver based on GPU. The architecture of the receiver is described, showing its performance, focusing on BER curves plot for CCSDS 131.2-B protocol.

p>Artificial Intelligence has gained widespread adoption across different industrial sectors, serving as a versatile tool to carry out a diverse array of tasks, ranging from image classification and traffic forecasting to natural language processing and speech recognition. In the space domain, however, a special focus must be placed on area overhea...

p>Artificial Intelligence has gained widespread adoption across different industrial sectors, serving as a versatile tool to carry out a diverse array of tasks, ranging from image classification and traffic forecasting to natural language processing and speech recognition. In the space domain, however, a special focus must be placed on area overhea...

p>This work presents a highly parameterised CGRA-based accelerator that we developed for an extensive Design Space Exploration activity on design parameters. The description starts from the CGRA building blocks, the Functional Units, and progresses towards the top level of the architecture, represented by the Node component, which is composed of an...

p>This work presents a highly parameterised CGRA-based accelerator that we developed for an extensive Design Space Exploration activity on design parameters. The description starts from the CGRA building blocks, the Functional Units, and progresses towards the top level of the architecture, represented by the Node component, which is composed of an...

Productivity and production quality have become primary goals for the success of companies in all industrial and manufacturing sectors. Performance in terms of productivity is influenced by several factors including machinery efficiency, work environment and safety conditions, production processes organization, and aspects related to workers’ behav...

Social integration is an essential part of the life of every human being, but for people with disabilities, there are many situations in which it is still very low. For instance, in sports and outdoor gaming, there is a barrier between players with and without disabilities. Individuals with disabilities play sports almost exclusively with disabled...

Dysarthria is a motor disorder of speech characterized by alteration of articulation and intelligibility of speech. The goal of dysarthria management is to optimize communication effectiveness for as long as possible. To help clinicians in monitoring disease progression and rehabilitation outcomes, the DESIRE tool analyzes several reading sessions...

Citation: Ciardi, R.; Vagaggini, S.; Marino, A.; Nannipieri, P.; Fanucci, L. SpaceART SpaceWire Sniffer for Link Monitoring: A Complete Communication Analysis in a Time-Constrained Test Scenario. Sensors 2023, 23, 1580. https:// Abstract: The on-board communication standard adopted in current generation space missions of the European Space Agency,...

Random number generators are a key element for various applications, such as computer simulation, statistical sampling, and cryptography. They are used to generate/derive cryptographic keys and non-repeating values, e.g., for symmetric or public key cyphers. The strength of a data protection system against cyber attacks corresponds to the strength...

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated outstanding results in several emerging classification tasks. The high-quality predictions are often achieved with computationally intensive workloads that hinder the hardware acceleration of these models at the edge. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have proven to be ene...

This work describes the hardware implementation of a cryptographic accelerators suite, named Crypto-Tile, in the framework of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) project. The EPI project traced the roadmap to develop the first family of low-power processors with the design fully made in Europe, for Big Data, supercomputers and automotive. Each...

Self-propelled wheelchairs are challenging to drive on off-road routes or require enormous physical effort in situations where the gradient exceeds 8%. For most people, these situations are too strenuous and therefore impractical. This work presents an innovative plug-and-play system to electrify a manual wheelchair. With the constraint of not irre...

Nowadays the number of Earth Observation (EO) missions are exponentially increasing. Each satellite may embark payloads which produce a big amount of data, that need to be transmitted on-ground. CCSDS 131.2-B-1 standard has been developed to address large data transmissions, hence it is suitable for this kind of missions. A limiting factor in the a...

Digital designs complexity has exponentially increased in the last decades. Heterogeneous Systems-on-Chip integrate many different hardware components which require a reliable and scalable verification environment. The effort to set up such environments has increased as well and plays a significant role in digital design projects, taking more than...

Wireless Sensor Networks are increasingly getting deployed for the safety use cases in industrial applications. While several research papers discuss about the Quality & Reliability improvement techniques in WSN systems to achieve minimal delay, higher node life, optimal routing etc., very limited work is witnessed on assessment of safety integrity...

In this article, we show a 60 GS/s two-stage 8 × 8 time-interleaved sampling circuit, where the second-stage nonlinearity can be controlled by using the voltage that optimizes the static distortions of the sampler. A calibration algorithm can extract the nonlinear contributions of the stages and compensate for them by setting the optimal bias volta...

SpaceWire (SpW) devices are widely used in space applications on-board satellites. Their verification is fundamental because it ensures that the Design Under Test (DUT) is bug-free, without the risk of compromising an entire space mission. In this paper an innovative architecture of a Verification Intellectual Property (VIP) based on Universal Veri...

The on-board communication standard adopted in current generation space missions of the European Space Agency(ESA), and many other agencies as well, is SpaceWire (SpW). In a SpW network, data are exchanged as well-formed packets, which structure offers low packet overhead and allows developers to easily tailor their implementation for SpW applicati...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of digital technologies, in all sectors and in particular in healthcare. In this scenario, in fact, telemedicine systems have been adopted to remotely monitor and manage infected patients or patients subjected to quarantine regulations. In Tuscany region, Italy, SatNav E@syCare, a telemonitoring...

In this brief, we propose a 60 GS/s high-linearity two-stage 8 × 8 time-interleaved track-and-hold circuit where it is possible to tune the static non-linearities of the second-stage buffer by applying a proper bias voltage. This allows us to maximize the static linearity of the buffer or introduce effects that counterbalance the non-linearities of...

SpaceWire (SpW) is a communication standard widely used in space applications. It requires, in addition to sending and receiving payload data, the continuous transmission between two hosts of information to establish and maintain active the communication link. This does not allow for a simple and efficient verification by sending ad hoc stimuli to...

On-Board Data Handling is a key feature of modern Spacecrafts, which usually include various on-board devices requiring effective testing during verification and integration phases. The test equipment used on ground to test spacecraft functionalities is referred to as Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE). This paper presents the design and de...

SpaceWire standard is the State-Of-The-Art for spacecraft On-Board-Data-Handling (OBDH) communication, defined by the European Space Agency (ESA) and adopted in numerous missions worldwide (e.g., Rosetta, BepiColombo, Mars Express, JWST). The development of SpaceWire compliant devices requires a specific set of test equipment instrumentation, to ve...

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have become important tools for tasks such as speech recognition, text generation, or natural language processing. However, their inference may involve up to billions of operations and their large number of parameters leads to large storage size and runtime memory usage. These reasons impede the adoption of these mo...

In the last few years, users have been increasingly demanding for a hands-free interaction with their digital devices. This kind of technology is even more useful if used by people with disabilities, improving their quality of life. In particular, speech-impaired users (e.g. dysarthric speakers) represent a big challenge for an Automatic Speech Rec...

In the cybersecurity field, the generation of random numbers is extremely important because they are employed in different applications such as the generation/derivation of cryptographic keys, nonces, and initialization vectors. The more unpredictable the random sequence, the higher its quality and the lower the probability of recovering the value...

This article proposes a method to design and implement an FPGA-based hardware accelerator for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) exploiting Partial Reconfigurability (PR). The design strategy was applied to the CloudScout CNN case study, a network developed in the frame of the \(\varPhi \)-sat-1 ESA mission to perform cloud-detection aboard the s...

In this work we create an environment to validate and implement a GPS L1 C/A fast acquisition core on COTS FPGAs. The frequency domain PCPS algorithm is studied on a Scilab test bench and the results are compared with the outputs of the GNSS-SDR simulator. Then all the PCPS algorithmic blocks are designed and fitted on an FPGA. The hardware core is...

This work shows how the acquisition of all modern GPS signals can be reduced to the iteration of a single FFT-based computational unit. In particular, acquisition algorithms for L5, L1C and L2C are compared to show how they can be solved with a series of 40920-point correlation units, leading to the possible hardware implementation of an efficient...

This paper presents a System-on-Chip (SoC) implementation of a cryptographic hardware accelerator supporting multiple AES based block cypher modes, including the more advanced CMAC, CCM, GCM and XTS modes. Furthermore, the proposed design implements in hardware advanced features for AES key secure storage. A flexible interface allows the communicat...

Recently, an ever-growing focus and attention is given to accessibility and enabling technologies for people with disabilities. In the mobility field, people with motor skill impairments exploit power wheelchairs to move in indoor and outdoor scenarios. AI-Drive aims to design an assistive power wheelchair for outdoor use, providing obstacle detect...

This article presents a cryptographic hardware (HW) accelerator supporting multiple advanced encryption standard (AES)-based block cipher modes, including the more advanced cipher-based MAC (CMAC), counter with CBC-MAC (CCM), Galois counter mode (GCM), and XOR-encrypt-XOR-based tweaked-codebook mode with ciphertext stealing (XTS) modes. The propose...

In recent years, public-key cryptography and digital signature have become fundamental components of digital infrastructures. Such a scenario has to face a new and increasing threat, represented by quantum computers. It is well known that quantum computers in the next years will be able to run algorithms capable of breaking the security of currentl...

Modern digital cameras use specific arrangement of Color Filter Array to sample light wavelength corresponding to visible colors. The most common Color Filter Array is the Bayer filter that samples only one color per pixel. To recover the full resolution image, an interpolation algorithm can be used. This process is called demosaicing and it is one...

Telemedicine platforms have been largely used to manage multiple problems during the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, they have given the possibility of remotely monitoring infected and high-risk patients, reducing hospitalisations. Telemonitoring systems with Global Navigation Satellite System technology allow to geo-localise all patients' measurements...

In recent years, FPGAs have demonstrated remarkable performance and contained power consumption for the on-the-edge inference of Convolutional Neural Networks. One of the main challenges in implementing this class of algorithms on board an FPGA is resource management, especially with regard to memory. This work presents a multi-cache system that al...

Within the field of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, facing impaired speech is a big challenge because standard approaches are ineffective in the presence of dysarthria. The first aim of our work is to confirm the effectiveness of a new speech analysis technique for speakers with dysarthria. This new approach exploits the fine-tuning of...

Oil spills represent one of the major threats to marine ecosystems. Satellite synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) sensors have been widely used to identify oil spills due to their ability to provide high resolution images during day and night under all weather conditions. In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially convo...

The complexity of heterogenous Systems-on-Chip has overgrown in the last decades, and the effort necessary to set up a verification workflow has increased as well. The time spent on the verification phase of a design takes on average 57% of the project time, and in these years, several solutions aimed to automate that task have been developed. Some...

Cybersecurity is a critical issue for Real-Time IoT applications since high performance and low latencies are required, along with security requirements to protect the large number of attack surfaces to which IoT devices are exposed. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is largely adopted in an IoT context to provide security services such as key-exch...

Congenital heart disease, the most frequent malformation at birth, is usually not fatal but leads to multiple hospitalisations and outpatient visits, with negative impact on the quality of life and psychological profile not only of children but also of their families. In this paper, we describe the entire architecture of a system for remotely monit...

The interaction between the membrane spike (S) protein of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the transmembrane angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor of the human epithelial host cell is the first step of infection, which has a critical role for viral pathogenesis of the current coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID...