Idea for Bachelor Thesis – A low-cost babysitter!

The ideas for doing micro-controller projects for bachelor thesis are numerous. Here is an example list. In addition to all of those possible directions to go, here is a simple idea: Let's create a small and low-cost micro-controller board which does a part of baby-sitting tasks. We implement a small audio processing engine on our micro-controller. Our board has microphones and listens to the surrounding sounds. It compares the received audio stream with known patterns and makes very basic conclusion about the current situation. the baby is asleep, or hungry or ... Our board can also contain other types of…
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Temperature variation aware multi-scale delay, power and thermal analysis at RT and gate level

Paper Title : Temperature variation aware multi-scale delay, power and thermal analysis at RT and gate level Thermal effects are rapidly gaining importance in nanometer CMOS technologies. Increased power density, coupled with spatio-temporal variability of chip workloads, causes on-die temperature non-uniformities. The assumption of a uniform temperature for the delay and power analysis of a large CMOS circuit produces inaccurate results. For this reason, significant design margins are taken to ensure safe operation. To improve design quality, we need precise localization of hotspots at detailed spatial resolution which is very computationally intensive. Consequently, thermal analysis needs to be done at…
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Lords of the Fallen, waste of Time and Money!

I have recently made a mistake and by looking at nice pictures posted from this game every where decided to purchase it for my PS4. The game comes with absolutely no new idea or innovation. In terms of weapons and how battles are performed in the game, it is way behind many other similar games being created several years ago. The only eye catching thing in this game is big soldiers with heavy armor. Even in terms of graphics it is not comparable with other games being released for consoles. In lack of innovative content to show to the gamers,…
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Lesson 12 – AXI Memory Mapped Interfaces and Hardware Debugging

So far we have been talking mostly about AXI stream interfaces. Now it is the time to have a look at AXI memory mapped interfaces. We begin with a brief look at the signals which create an AXI memory mapped interface. Then we create an example design and with the aid of hardware debugging tool which is integrated into Vivado we take a look at how these signals interact with each other during a read or a write transaction. This lesson is created at the professional video recording studio of TU Kaiserslautern and belongs to the Microelectronic Systems Design Research…
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Lesson 11 – Booting Linux on the ARM host of ZYNQ

So far we have shown our example designs on the ZYNQ device using a bare-metal system for the ARM CPU cores. In this lesson we focus on the procedure through which the Linux operating system can be run on the ARM cores of the ZYNQ. We try to show every possible option for bringing up Linux on the ZYNQ. We then create a simple hardware, consisting of two GPIO units implemented on the PL. For these hardware units we develop a Linux kernel level driver, along with its user level application, so that we can write to these hardware blocks…
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Lesson 10 – AXI DMA in Scatter Gather Mode

During previous lesson we learned how to use AXI DMA unit to transfer data from an AXI Stream Master to an AXI Memory Mapped slave port. We showed how AXI DMA can be programmed in order to perform the required transfer task. We did this with the ZYNQ device and we practically showed examples on the ZED board. In the previous lesson, whenever we want to perform a data transfer using AXI DMA we should program it. Thus for every transfer the CPU should program the AXI DMA. But some times, the required sequence of transfers are known and we…
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Lesson 9 – Software development for ZYNQ using Xilinx SDK (Transfer data from ZYNQ PL to PS)

During the previous lessons, we described the basic concepts of AXI interfaces and then we talked about AXI Stream interfaces in more detail. We showed how you can create your own custom AXI Stream units by using Vivado HLS or by directly creating the design using Verilog. After AXI Stream interfaces, it makes sense to go towards more complicated AXI memory mapped interfaces however, I have decided to first focus on software development for the ARM host of the ZYNQ device. During these the videos in this lesson, we will go through how you use the Xilinx SDK environment to…
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OpenCV Error: Gpu API call (no CUDA-capable device is detected)

In case you are trying to use OpenCV with CUDA, you might first like to make sure that your OpenCV code is actually seeing the GPU. So in the early part of your OpenCV code, you will have a small call like this: cv::gpu::setDevice(0); cv::gpu::printShortCudaDeviceInfo(cv::gpu::getDevice()); Running the code, you may receive an error message like the following: OpenCV Error: Gpu API call (no CUDA-capable device is detected) in terminate called after throwing an instance of 'cv::Exception' And you are sure that the CUDA enabled graphics card is there. There are a set of things to check when the above happens.…
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Playstation 4 Power Consumption: A Quick Analysis

Here  is the results of the analysis that I have done on power consumption of Playstation 4. During my analysis I play different games and I measure the averaged power of PS4 during game play and I report the results. Furthermore, I show the power consumption of the device during different states and during execution of different tasks. I show that there is still room for the operating system on the playstation 4 to save power. Watch the complete video Online.  
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The Operating System which sold 1 million copies in 24 hours!

During my life, I have been always curious about FreeBSD. I have been always trying to learn more about it and actually, I learned the concepts of File Systems from the FreeBSD documentation. After 2011 however, when I began the PhD, I didn't look at the FreeBSD any more and I thought it will soon join the history! Just this morning I was going through different web sites related to the Xilinx ZYNQ device and surprisingly I found a guy who is running the FreeBSD on the ARM host of the ZYNQ. I though with myself, "why some one should…
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