Sergio Cuenca-Asensi

Sergio Cuenca-Asensi
  • Professor
  • Professor (Full) at University of Alicante

About

113
Publications
15,977
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
795
Citations
Introduction
Fault Tolerance, FPGAs, Systems on Chip, GPU, Aerospace Systems, Computer Vision
Current institution
University of Alicante
Current position
  • Professor (Full)

Publications

Publications (113)
Article
A software technique based on approximate computing and redundancy is presented to mitigate radiation-induced soft errors in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) microprocessors. Approximate computing relies on the capability of certain applications to accept imprecise results to improve efficiency by sacrificing its results in a controlled manner. Our...
Article
A software technique is presented to protect commercial multi-core microprocessors against radiation-induced soft errors. Important time overheads associated with conventional software redundancy techniques limit the feasibility of advanced critical electronic systems. In our approach, redundant bare-metal threads are used, so that critical computa...
Article
Most safety-critical edge-computing devices rely on lightweight cryptography (LWC) algorithms to provide security at minimum power and performance overhead. LWC algorithms are traditionally embedded as a hardware component, but with the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), emerging firmware is more likely to support cryptography algorithms to c...
Article
Deep neural network (DNN) models are being deployed in safety-critical embedded devices for object identification, recognition, and even trajectory prediction. Optimised versions of such models, in particular the convolutional ones, are becoming increasingly common in resource-constrained edge-computing devices (e.g., sensors, drones), which typica...
Article
The use of state-of-the-art commercial processors such as graphical processing units (GPUs) is becoming increasingly common in the New Space industry in order to ensure high performance and power efficiency. However, commercial GPUs are not designed to operate in a harsh environment and therefore different protection techniques need to be applied t...
Article
Statistical fault injection is widely used to estimate the reliability of mission-critical microprocessor-based systems when exposed to radiation and to evaluate the performance of fault mitigation strategies. However, further research is needed to gain a better understanding of the accuracy of the results and the feasibility of their application u...
Article
This work presents the evaluation of a new dual-core lockstep hybrid approach aimed to improve the fault tolerance in microprocessors. Our approach takes advantage of modern multicore processor resources to combine software-based lockstep with a custom hardware observer. The first is used to duplicate data and instruction flows; meanwhile, the seco...
Article
Full-text available
This Special Issues brings four invited papers that describe the state of the art techniques to improve fault tolerance on complex designs. Integrated circuits operating under radiation can experience undesirable faults that must be evaluated and mitigated. Mitigation can be implemented by redundancy in hardware or in software, and by selecting and...
Article
Full-text available
This paper deals with the new trend of algorithm development in embedded systems, more specifically, object localization and classification algorithms. Different one-stage and two-stage detection algorithms are presented, which have different characteristics. The most relevant algorithm on which the article will focus is YOL0. The YOLOv3, YOLOv4 an...
Article
Objective Based on some of the recommendations of the SEMICYUC working groups, we developed a checklist and applied it in two periods, analyzing their behavior as a tool for improving safety. Design A comparative pre- and post-intervention longitudinal study was carried out. Setting The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a 400-bed university hospital....
Article
A mathematical model is described to predict microprocessor fault tolerance under radiation. The model is empirically trained by combining data from simulated faultinjection campaigns, and radiation experiments, both with protons (at the CNA facilities, Seville, Spain) and with neutrons (at the LANSCE Weapons Neutron Research facility at Los Alamos...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents a software protection technique against radiation-induced faults which is based on a multi-threaded strategy. Data triplication and instructions flow duplication or triplication techniques are used to improve system reliability and thus, ensure a correct system operation. To achieve this objective, a relaxed lockstep model to...
Article
Full-text available
A significant challenge in neuroscience is understanding how visual information is encoded in the retina. Such knowledge is extremely important for the purpose of designing bioinspired sensors and artificial retinal systems that will, in so far as may be possible, be capable of mimicking vertebrate retinal behaviour. In this study, we report the tu...
Article
This work presents a new Dual-Core LockStep approach to enhance fault tolerance in microprocessors. The proposed technique is based on the combination of software-based data checking and trace-based control-flow checking through an external hardware module. The hardware module is connected to the trace interface and is able to observe the execution...
Article
Resumen Objetivo Con algunas de las recomendaciones de los grupos de trabajo de la SEMICYUC elaboramos un checklist y lo aplicamos en 2 periodos. Analizamos su comportamiento como herramienta de mejora en la seguridad. Diseño Estudio longitudinal, comparativo pre- y postintervención. Ámbito Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos de un hospital universita...
Article
Full-text available
A high-level C++ hardening library is designed for the protection of critical software against the harmful effects of radiation environments that can damage systems. A mathematical and empirical model to predict system behavior in the presence of radiation induced faults is also presented. This model generates a quick evaluation and adjustment of s...
Article
Approximate Triple Modular Redundancy (ATMR), which is the implementation of TMR with approximate versions of the target circuit, has emerged in recent years as an alternative to partial hardware replication where designers can explore reduced area overhead combined with some compromise on fault masking. This work presents a novel approach for impl...
Article
A method is presented for automated improvement of embedded application reliability. The compilation process is guided using Genetic Algorithms and a Multi-Objective Optimization Approach (MOOGA). Even though modern compilers are not designed to generate reliable builds, they can be tuned to obtain compilations that improve their reliability, throu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We investigate the automatic reliability improvement of embedded software when applying non-intrusive soft-computing techniques to tune the compilation process. Our fault-injection simulation results are correlated with different protons experiments. ARM-based SoCs and different programs have been used to assess our technique.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Este artículo propone una estrategia de mejora de la tolerancia frente a fallos producidos por radiación en sistemas empotrados complejos sin sistema operativo (standalone). Para alcanzar este objetivo, se han adaptado dos técnicas clásicas de tolerancia frente a fallos basadas en redundancia software en sistemas mono-núcleo, para explotar el paral...
Article
Approximate Triple Modular Redundancy (ATMR), which is the implementation of TMR with approximate versions of the target circuit, has emerged in recent years as an alternative to partial hardware replication where designers can explore reduced area overhead combined with some compromise on fault masking. This work presents a novel approach for impl...
Article
This paper presents a metric for the efficient application of selective hardening using software-based techniques against soft errors. It offers a method for selecting the resources to be protected obtaining maximum fault coverage with the minimum overhead. Common approaches are based on exhaustive exploration of the solution space or time-consumin...
Chapter
Full-text available
Having a knowledge of muscle activity, one can draw conclusions related to human movement, health condition or even behaviour. Manual detection of a muscle activity based on the electromyographic (EMG) signals is a tedious and time-consuming task. Some applications require online indication what entails the need of automatic estimator. Popular and...
Article
Full-text available
Grid-based perception techniques in the automotive sector based on fusing information from different sensors and their robust perceptions of the environment are proliferating in the industry. However, one of the main drawbacks of these techniques is the traditionally prohibitive, high computing performance that is required for embedded automotive s...
Conference Paper
One of the basic questions in neuroscience is how visual information is encoded in the retina. To design artificial retinal systems it is essential to emulate the mammalian retinal behaviour as well as possible. Furthermore, this is a question of primary interest in the design of an artificial neuroprosthesis where it is necessary to mimic the reti...
Article
Full-text available
Autonomous vehicle systems are currently the object of intense research within scientific and industrial communities; however, many problems remain to be solved. One of the most critical aspects addressed in both autonomous driving and robotics is environment perception, since it consists of the ability to understand the surroundings of the vehicle...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we present a method for autofocusing images of sputum smears taken from a microscope which combines the finding of the optimal focus distance with an algorithm for extending the depth of field (EDoF). Our multifocus fusion method produces an unique image where all the relevant objects of the analyzed scene are well focused, independen...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Reliability evaluation of Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processors against faults induced by radiation is a challenging problem. Some alternatives have been proposed to radiation test but they are very time consuming and lack of the observability needed. This work analyses the possibility to use an HDL model for estimating applications dependabil...
Article
ARM processors are leaders in embedded systems, delivering high-performance computing, power efficiency, and reduced cost. For this reason, there is a relevant interest for its use in the aerospace industry. However, the use of sub-micron technologies has increased the sensitivity to radiation-induced transient faults. Thus, the mitigation of soft...
Poster
Full-text available
Many applications in computer vision require a high computational time for their processing. In general terms, those applications carry out several basic morphological real-time convolutions which are highly parallelizable. Using the above-mentioned convolutions along with a stack of images obtained with a digital microscope with different focusing...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a fault injection system for performing fault injection campaigns on Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) microprocessors. The proposed system takes advantage of the debug facilities of modern microprocessors along with standard GNU Debugger (GDB) for executing and debugging benchmarks. The developed experiments on real boards, as we...
Article
The retina is a very complex neural structure, which contains many different types of neurons interconnected with great precision, enabling sophisticated conditioning and coding of the visual information before it is passed via the optic nerve to higher visual centers. The encoding of visual information is one of the basic questions in visual and c...
Chapter
There is an increasing interest in aerospace industry to increment the flexibility of the systems and reduce their cost. In this way, FPGAs offer several advantages as low-cost platform to deploy customized systems. However, the use of sub-micron technologies has increased their sensitivity to radiation-induced transient faults. Therefore, the miti...
Chapter
This chapter aims to present different approaches and techniques available in literature regarding the fault mitigation on soft-core processors, with an especial emphasis on those ones involving hardware/software hybrid-based solutions.
Chapter
The use of COTS FPGAs as deployment platform of microprocessor based systems represents an attractive alternative on aerospace applications, because their programmability, performance and cost-effectiveness. However, traditional hardening has a remarkable impact on resources and performance that limits their applicability. Selective hardening, that...
Article
Software-based techniques offer several advantages to increase the reliability of processor-based systems at very low cost, but they cause performance degradation and an increase of the code size. To meet constraints in performance and memory, we propose SETA, a new control-flow software-only technique that uses assertions to detect errors affectin...
Conference Paper
A set of software-based techniques to detect soft errors in embedded ARM processors at low costs is presented. Fault injection results show high fault coverage at performance and memory overheads inferior to state-of-the-art techniques.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The retina is responsible for transducing visual information into spikes trains which are then sent via the optical nerve to the visual cortex. This is the first step in the visual pathway responsible for the sense of vision. Our research group is working on the design of a cortical visual neuroprosthesis aimed to restore some functional vision to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper analyses the nature of fault tolerance software-based techniques and the influence of their overheads to determine an efficient strategy for applying those techniques in a selective way. Several considerations that have to be taken into account are presented in this work. These include an analysis of fault coverage and overheads when sel...
Article
Our eyes never remain still. Even when we stare at a fixed point, small involuntary movements take place in our eyes in an imperceptible manner. Researchers agree on the presence of three main contributions to eye movements when we fix the gaze: microsaccades, drifts and tremor. These small movements carry the image across the retina stimulating th...
Article
Full-text available
Hardware/software partitioning is a key task for embedded system co-design. The goal of this task is to decide which components of an application will be executed in a general purpose processor (software) and which ones on a specific hardware. To support this decision a design space exploration is executed, by the evaluation of several solutions to...
Article
Full-text available
There is an increasing concern to reduce the cost and overheads during the development of reliable systems. Selective protection of most critical parts of the systems represents a viable solution to obtain a high level of reliability at a fraction of the cost. In particular to design a selective fault mitigation strategy for processor-based systems...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Soft errors are a major concern in aerospace applications. Software-based fault-tolerance techniques offer several advantages to increase the reliability of these applications if a microprocessor or microcontroller is utilized. However, the protection of the data-flow implies data and instruction redundancy which brings significant increment in exe...
Article
Full-text available
The use of microprocessor-based systems is gaining importance in application domains where safety is a must. For this reason, there is a growing concern about the mitigation of SEU and SET effects. This paper presents a new hybrid technique aimed to protect both the data and the control-flow of embedded applications running on microprocessors. On o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a metric to estimate the register file criticality in processor-based systems. Due to project constrains, it is mandatory to identify and prioritize the most critical registers to protect when a selective fault mitigation approach is needed. The metric is based on the combination of three different criteria, which are computed d...
Article
Full-text available
Commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors are the core of low-cost embedded systems due to their programmability and cost-effectiveness. Recent advances in electronic technologies have allowed remarkable improvements in their performance. However, they have also made microprocessors more susceptible to transient faults induced by radiation. These no...
Article
Full-text available
The protection of processor-based systems to mitigate the harmful effects of transient faults (hardening) is gaining im-portance as technology shrinks. Hybrid hardware/software hardening approaches are promising alternatives in the de-sign of such fault tolerant systems. This paper presents a compiler-based infrastructure for facilitating the explo...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, a new approach to facilitate the development of heterogeneous embedded vision systems, by means of a software-friendly design flow is proposed. Our work is based on a framework called AMAZynq, especially focused on leverage the resources of Xilinx Zynq devices. Starting from an OpenCV code, the user defines explicitly the HW/SW parti...
Conference Paper
Our eyes never remain still. Even when we stare at a point, small involuntary movements move our eyes in an imperceptible manner. Researchers agree on the presence of three main contributions to eye movements when we fix the gaze: microsaccades, drifts and tremor. These small movements carry the image across the retina stimulating the photoreceptor...
Article
Full-text available
Hardware/Software partitioning (HSP) is a key task for embedded system co-design. The main goal of this task is to decide which components of an application are to be executed in a general purpose processor (software) and which ones, on a specific hardware, taking into account a set of restrictions expressed by metrics. In last years, several appro...
Article
Full-text available
Hardware/Software partitioning (HSP) is a key task for embedded system co-design. The main goal of this task is to decide which components of an application are to be executed in a general purpose processor (software) and which ones, on a specific hardware, taking into account a set of restrictions expressed by metrics. In last years, several appro...
Article
Hardware/software partitioning is a key task for embedded system co-design. The main goal of this task is to decide which components of an application will be executed in a general purpose processor (software) and which ones on a specific hardware. In last years, several approaches have been proposed for solving the HSP problem, directed by metaheu...
Article
The retina is a very complex neural structure, which performs spatial, temporal, and chromatic processing on visual information and converts it into a compact ‘digital’ format composed of neural impulses. This paper presents a new compiler-based framework able to describe, simulate and validate custom retina models. The framework is compatible with...
Article
Full-text available
We propose a new methodology for hardware/software co-design of embedded systems which is specifically aimed to mitigate SET effects. A hardening infrastructure is used to generate different versions of the design using several combinations of hardware and software hardening which are evaluated with respect to SET effects. The advantages of the pro...
Article
The protection of processor-based systems to mitigate the harmful effect of transient faults (soft errors) is gaining importance as technology shrinks. At the same time, for large segments of embedded markets, parameters like cost and performance continue to be as important as reliability. This paper presents a compiler-based methodology for facili...
Article
Obfuscation and code encryption applied to ensure confidentiality achieve some degree of tamper resistance due to the complexity of the analysis required to break these protection schemes. However, there are very few proposals that combine high integrity and confidentiality levels at the same time. In the context of engineering education software,...
Article
There is an increasing interest in the aerospace industry to reduce the cost of the systems by means of using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) devices. The engineering of novel microsatellites and nanosatellites are clear examples of this new trend. However, the use of sub-micron technologies has led to greater sensitivity of these devices to radiat...
Conference Paper
This paper remarks the importance of defining real conditions for the radiation effects evaluation on embedded systems using a fault injection system. The influence of fault latency on the experiment results is illustrated by means of a case study.
Article
Full-text available
There is an increasing concern about the mitigation of radiation effects in embedded systems. This fact is demanding new flexible design methodologies and tools that allow dealing with design constraints and dependability requirements at the same time. This paper presents a novel proposal to design radiation-tolerant embedded systems combining hard...
Article
Tool path generation is an important task that must be supported by the controller of a STEP-NC compliant CNC machine tool. However, these algorithms demand higher computation performance, which makes the implementation on many existing systems very slow or even impractical. This fact is one of the main barriers for the adoption of the STEP-NC stan...
Article
Full-text available
The mechanical digitizers are robust and accurate but they have the disadvantage of not providing the digitized surface directly. Moreover, the information provided is often presented as a cloud of points, which makes the surface interpolation process difficult. Presented in the paper there is an algorithm that virtually reproduces the digitalizati...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The retina is a very complex neural structure, which contains many different types of neurons interconnected with great precision, enabling sophisticated conditioning and coding of the visual information before it is passed via the optic nerve to higher visual centers. Therefore the retina performs spatial, temporal, and chromatic processing on vis...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a novel methodology for the HW/SW co-design of fault tolerant embedded systems that pursues the mitigation of radiation-induced upset events (which are a class of Single Event Effects - SEEs) on critical industrial applications. The proposal combines the flexibility and low cost of Software Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance (...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a novel low cost development environment for automatic hardening against Single Event Effects (SEE) of embedded systems through software redundancy. The environment is based on a generic architecture to handle multiple targets and is comprised of an automatic hardening compiler and an instruction set simulator. As a case study,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Technological advances of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) are making that this technology becomes the most preferred platform for the rapid prototyping of highly integrated digital systems. In addition, protection of processor-based systems to mitigate the harmful effects of radiation-induced upset events is gaining importance while technology...
Conference Paper
In order to fulfill the new ISO 14649 (STEP-NC), Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machines need to support high computational demand algorithms. This fact is one of the main barriers for the adoption of the STEP-NC standard for CNC machines. Hardware acceleration is an incremental solution that can be cleanly added to these systems while keeping ever...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Web services framework is specially conceived for integrating, in an easy way, different internet services from different providers. Web services have been widely adopted in business applications using PC-based servers as their main implementation platform. However, the nowadays growing computational and communication power of the FPGA devices...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Embedded web servers have a growing presence in a wide range of fields related to consumer electronics and industrial applications. FPGAs are a valid alternative in the implementation of these systems adding additional advantages to the traditional architectures based on microprocessors or microcontrollers. In this paper we introduce two web server...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Tool path generation is one of the most complex problems in computer aided manufacturing. Although some efficient strategies have been developed, most of them are only useful for standard machining. The algorithm called virtual digitizing avoids this problem by its own definition but its computing cost is high and makes it difficult for being integ...
Conference Paper
Tool path generation is one of the most complex problems in computer aided manufacturing. The algorithm called virtual digitizing avoids this problem by its own definition but its computing cost is high. Presented in the paper there is a virtual digitizing hardware/software architecture that takes advantage of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Tool path generation is one of the most complex problems in computer aided manufacturing. Although some efficient strategies have been developed, most of them are only useful for standard machining. The algorithm called Virtual Digitizing avoids this problem by its own definition but its computing cost is high and make it difficult for being integr...
Chapter
There are several approaches to texture analysis and classification. Most have limitations in accurate discrimination or complexity in time calculation. A first phase is the extraction of texture features and later we classify it. Texture features should have the followings properties: be invariant under the transformations of translation, rotation...
Article
In this paper we present a novel codesign environment which is conceived especially for computer vision hybrid systems. This setting is based on Mathworks Simulink and Xilinx System Generator tools and is comprised of the following: an incremental codesign flow, diverse libraries of virtual components with three levels of description (high level, h...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we present a novel Simulink blockset which is conceived especially for image processing hybrid systems. The blockset is composed of several libraries with different abstraction levels (high-level, hardware and software) allowing the co-design and simulation of an entire hardware/software system. This background setting is complemented...
Conference Paper
In this paper we present a codesign methodology for high-performance Automated Visual Inspection systems (AVIs). The proposal consists in reference hardware/software architecture and its associated co-verification environment. The codesign method is stepwise refinement-based process that starts with a preliminary hw/sw partition based on the refere...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper shows how the Xilinx System Generator can be used to develop hardware-based computer vision algorithms from a system level ap-proach without the necessity of in-depth knowing neither a hardware descrip-tion language nor the particulars of the hardware platform. Also, it is demon-strated that Simulink can be employed as a co-design and co...
Conference Paper
The paper presents a new efficient approach to texture analysis based on distributions of simple spatial and tonal relationships. The texture description proposed makes use of a semicover concept over binary planes derived from grey images. A measure of the local semicover tendency based on joint occurrences of elementary semicover patterns is desc...
Article
Full-text available
Tool path generation is one of the most complex problems in Computer Aided Manufacturing. Although some efficient strategies have been developed to solve it, most of them are only useful for 3 and 5 axis standard machining. The algorithm called Virtual Digitising computes the tool path by means of a “virtually digitised” model of the surface and a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a new efficient and fast approach to texture characterization for high-speed Web inspection applications (mainly focused on textured material grading and fault detection). The texture description proposed makes use of semicover concept over binary planes derived from grey images. A measure of the local semicover tendency based o...
Conference Paper
In most of the automated systems for visual inspection tasks, real time requirements constitute an important aspect to have in to account in the design of them. Often, a frame-grabber attached to a computer using MMX-optimised software libraries is not enough to satisfy the above requirements and it is necessary to use expensive specialised hardwar...

Network

Cited By