Tiziana Fanni

• Doctor of Engineering
• Senior Researcher at Abinsula Srl

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are dynamic and reactive systems interacting with processes, environment and, sometimes, humans. They are often distributed with sensors and actuators, characterized for being smart, adaptive, predictive and react in real-time. Indeed, image- and video-processing pipelines are a prime source for environmental informati...

Advanced computations on embedded devices are nowadays a must in any application field. Often, to cope with such a need, embedded systems designers leverage on complex heterogeneous reconfigurable platforms that offer high performance, thanks to the possibility of specializing/customizing some computing elements on board, and are usually flexible e...

Modern embedded and cyber-physical systems require every day more performance, power efficiency and flexibility, to execute several profiles and functionalities targeting the ever growing adaptivity needs and preserving execution efficiency. Such requirements pushed designers towards the adoption of heterogeneous and reconfigurable substrates, whic...

In the era of Cyber Physical Systems, designers need to offer support for run-time adaptivity considering different constraints, including the internal status of the system. This work presents a run-time monitoring approach, based on the Performance Application Programming Interface, that offers a unified interface to transparently access both the...

With the diffusion of complex heterogeneous platforms and their need of characterization, monitoring the system gained increasing interest. This work proposes a framework to build custom and modular monitoring systems, flexible enough to face the heterogeneity of modern platforms, offering a predictable HW/SW impact.

With the diffusion of cyber-physical systems and internet of things, adaptivity and low power consumption became of primary importance in digital systems design. Reconfigurable heterogeneous platforms seem to be one of the most suitable choices to cope with such challenging context. However, their development and power optimization are not trivial,...

Modern embedded and cyber-physical systems require every day more performance, power efficiency and flexibility, to execute several profiles and functionalities targeting the ever growing adaptivity needs and preserving execution efficiency. Such requirements pushed designers towards the adoption of heterogeneous and reconfigurable substrates, whic...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are dynamic and reactive systems interacting with processes, environment and, sometimes, humans. They are often distributed with sensors and actuators, smart, adaptive, predictive and react in real-time. Indeed, as sight for human beings, image- and video-processing pipelines are a prime source for environmental informa...

In this paper, we present a new, simple, accurate and fast power estimation technique that can be used to explore the power consumption of digital system designs at an early design stage. We exploit the machine learning techniques to aid the designers in exploring the design space of possible architectural solutions, and more specifically, their dy...

Modern embedded computing platforms used within Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are nowadays leveraging more and more often on heterogeneous computing substrates, such as newest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Compared to general purpose platforms, which have a fixed datapath, FPGAs provide designers the possibility of customizing part o...

Computer aided design is nowadays a must to quickly provide optimized circuits, to cope with stringent time to market constraints, and to be able to guarantee colliding constrained requirements. Design automation is exploited, whenever possible, to speed up the design process and relieve the developers from error prone customization, optimization a...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are interconnected devices, reactive and dynamic to sensed external and internal triggers. The H2020 CERBERO EU Project is developing a design environment composed by modelling, deployment and verification tools for adaptive CPS. This paper focuses on its efficient support for run-time self-adaptivity.

INTRODUCTION:: Cyber comes from Greek adjective kyberneticos (cybernetic) which means skilled in steering or governing. Already from ancient times people constructed various machines (physical systems) and their controllers (cyber systems). Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a compound system engineered through integration of cyber and physical sub-s...

In this paper, we present a flexible, simple and accurate power modeling technique that can be used to estimate the power consumption of modern technology devices. We exploit Artificial Neural Networks for power and behavioral estimation in Application Specific Integrated Circuits. Our method, called NeuPow, relies on propagating the predictors bet...

In the era of Cyber Physical Systems, designers need to offer support for run-time adaptivity considering different constraints, including the internal status of the system. This work proposes a run-time monitoring approach for hardware accelerators, based on the Performance Application Programming Interface.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are embedded computational collaborating devices, capable of sensing and controlling physical elements and, often, responding to humans. Designing and managing systems able to respond to different, concurrent requirements during operation is not straightforward, and introduce the need of proper support at design-time an...

Cyber Physical Systems are highly adaptive systems, prone to change behaviour due to external/internal conditions. From the computation point of view, reconfigurable systems may address adaptation. In this paper, by a set of examples we show how coarse-grained reconfiguration may successfully allow achieving dynamic trade-off management, while cons...

This paper presents a new methodology for design and implementation of signal processing systems on system-on-chip (SoC) platforms. The methodology is centered on the use of lightweight application programming interfaces for applying principles of dataflow design at different layers of abstraction. The development processes integrated in our approa...

Dataflow models of computation are capable of providing high-level descriptions for hardware and software components and systems, facilitating efficient processes for system-level design. The modularity and parallelism of dataflow representations make them suitable for key aspects of design exploration and optimization, such as efficient scheduling...

Modern embedded systems, to accommodate different applications or functionalities over the same substrate and provide flexibility at the hardware level, are often resource redundant and, consequently, power hungry. Therefore, dedicated design frameworks are required to implement efficient runtime reconfigurable platforms. Such frameworks, to challe...

Dataflow modeling techniques facilitate many aspects of design exploration and optimization for signal processing systems, such as efficient scheduling, memory management, and task synchronization. The lightweight dataflow (LWDF) programming methodology provides an abstract programming model that supports dataflow-based design and implementation of...

Coarse-grained reconfigurable systems are capable of providing flexibility and optimal performance, suitable for nowadays embedded computing systems. The RPCT project has tackled the issue of their complex design, debug and mapping. Demonstration of its potentials and features are presented on an MPEG HEVC motion compensation use case.

In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable design of the Advanced Encryption Standard capable of adapting at runtime to the requirements of the target application. Reconfiguration is achieved by activating only a specific subset of all the instantiated processing elements. Further, we explore the effectiveness of power gating and clock gating metho...

Power reduction is one of the biggest challenges in modern systems and tends to become a severe issue dealing with complex scenarios. To provide high-performance and flexibility, designers often opt for coarse-grained reconfigurable (CGR) systems. Nevertheless, these systems require specific attention to the power problem, since large set of resour...

This paper focuses on how to efficiently reduce power consumption in coarse-grained reconfigurable designs, to allow their effective adoption in heterogeneous architectures supporting and accelerating complex and highly variable multifunctional applications. We propose a design flow for this kind of architectures that, besides their automatic custo...

Modern embedded systems designers are required to implement efficient multi-functional applications, over portable platforms under strong energy and resources constraints. Automatic tools may help them in challenging such a complex scenario: to develop complex reconfigurable systems while reducing time-to-market. At the same time, automated methodo...