PFI-TT: Creating Commercial-grade Hardware Design Tools for Automated Design of Application-specific Embedded Systems

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) project is the ability to automatically create highly-optimized application-specific systems with minimal engineering effort. This ability will be an enabler in several growing and emerging industry sectors, such as IoT, med-tech, wearables, and printed electronics. For the low-power systems that drive these applications, energy efficiency is the primary factor that determines critical characteristics such as size, weight, cost, reliability, and lifetime. Likewise, security is critical for these systems, as they collect and handle data encompassing many aspects of daily life and thus expose a huge attack surface for information security attacks. Automated solutions for security and energy efficiency developed in this project can potentially make a disruptive impact on the IoT space, which is predicted to have a market size of $457 billion by 2020. Tools developed in this project can significantly reduce design time and cost for application-specific systems, enabling wider deployment and providing traction for entirely new markets such as DIY printed processors. Additionally, these tools can improve information security for the population at large and allow broader deployment of intelligent systems integrated into a large number of daily activities. The proposed project will create commercial-grade electronic design automation tools that can automatically create an application-specific hardware design for a specific target application. These tools will have the capability to optimize designs for extreme energy efficiency and to perform security analysis that can guarantee the security of a system for a set of desired security properties. The primary work of this project involves translating research tools into commercial-grade tools, based on industry-defined needs and requirements. Transforming the research tools into tools that can be seamlessly integrated into industry design flows requires enhancements to allow the tools to support arbitrary hardware designs and system components. The tools must also be optimized to enable scalable analysis of larger hardware designs and more complex applications used in industry. To demonstrate commercial viability, the developed tools will be evaluated on industry designs and applications and must demonstrate the ability to create highly-optimized application-specific hardware designs quickly, efficiently, and automatically with little engineering effort. Tools that can meet these objectives will have strong commercial potential in a number of industries that require ultra-low-power application-specific systems, such as IoT, med-tech, and printed electronics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.