CSR-EHCS(EHS), SM: Investigating a Novel Embedded Processor Architecture for Electonic Textiles in Wearable and Pervasive Computing

这个项目的目的是探索电子纺织品（e-纺织品）的新型嵌入式处理器架构。电子纺织品是一种智能织物，传感器和计算是织物固有的，应用于医疗、娱乐和体育。电子纺织品在嵌入式系统设计空间中占据了一个极其受限的点，它在整个织物中分布着大量联网的传感器和处理器，对性能、能耗和可靠性的要求也很严格。弗吉尼亚理工大学电子纺织品实验室的研究表明，模型驱动工程（MDE）方法允许设计师有效地管理电子纺织品设计空间的复杂性，其中包括纤维选择、编织图案、织物中电气/通信网络的物理拓扑、传感器/执行器节点的数量/类型/位置、计算节点的数量和类型、系统软件组织和应用算法等问题。然而，由于MDE设计规范和目标微处理器之间存在根本的不匹配，因此MDE方法不能产生既易于移植又具有功耗和性能效率的实现。这个项目的方法是开发一个事件驱动的计算机体系结构家族，它提供了一个与MDE设计规范很好匹配的抽象。这个项目的潜在好处包括使用架构族来提高可靠性、设计成本和嵌入式系统的能源效率，而不是电子纺织品。该项目的更广泛影响包括电子纺织品在医疗监测、可穿戴计算和普适计算中的应用。教育方面的好处包括为本科生和研究生提供多学科的研究经验。

The purpose of this project is to explore novel embedded processor architectures for electronic textiles (e-textiles). E-textiles are intelligent fabrics where sensors and computation are intrinsic to the cloth, with applications in medicine, entertainment, and sports. E-textiles occupy an extremely constrained point in the embedded system design space, having a large number of networked sensors and processors distributed throughout the fabric and tight requirements on performance, energy consumption, and reliability.Research at the Virginia Tech E-textiles Lab has shown that a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach allows designers to effectively manage the complexity of the e-textile design space, which includes issues such as fiber selection, the weave pattern, the physical topology of the electrical/communication network in the fabric, the number/type/location of sensor/actuator nodes, the number and type of computational nodes, the system software organization, and the application algorithms.However, an MDE approach does not yield an implementation that is easily portable while being power- and performance-efficient, due to a fundamental mismatch between the MDE design specification and the target microprocessors. The approach in this project is to develop an event-driven computer architecture family that presents an abstraction that is well-matched to the MDE design specification.The potential benefits of this project include using the architecture family to improve the reliability, design cost, and energy efficiency of embedded systems besides e-textiles. The broader impacts of the project include e-textile applications in medical monitoring, wearable computing, and pervasive computing. Educational benefits include providing undergraduate and graduate students with multidisciplinary research experience.