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

本项目的目的是探索用于电子纺织品(电子纺织品)的新型嵌入式处理器架构。电子纺织品是一种智能面料，其中传感器和计算是布料固有的，在医疗、娱乐和体育方面有应用。在弗吉尼亚理工学院电子纺织品实验室的研究表明，模型驱动工程(MDE)方法允许设计者有效地管理电子纺织品设计空间的复杂性，包括诸如纤维选择、编织图案、织物中的电气/通信网络的物理拓扑、传感器/致动器节点的数量/类型/位置、计算节点的数量和类型、系统软件组织、然而，由于MDE设计规范和目标微处理器之间的根本不匹配，MDE方法不能产生在功率和性能高效的同时易于移植的实现。这个项目的方法是开发一个事件驱动的计算机体系结构系列，它提供了一个与MDE设计规范很好匹配的抽象。该项目的潜在好处包括使用该体系结构系列来提高嵌入式系统的可靠性、设计成本和能源效率，以及电子纺织品。该项目的更广泛影响包括电子纺织品在医疗监测、可穿戴计算和普及计算中的应用。教育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.