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Ziel dieser Dissertation war es, die Eignung von Ultra-Breitband-Pulsfunk (IR-UWB) für die drahtlose Kommunikation in der Sensor/Aktor-Ebene der Fertigungsautomatisierung zu untersuchen. Dazu wurde ein drahtloses Kommunikationssystem auf Basis standardisierter Protokolle entworfen und untersucht. Diese Anwendung erfordert die Erfüllung harter Echtzeitfähigkeit im Bereich weniger Millisekunden in industriellen Umgebungen. Ein solches Umfeld stellt aufgrund eines hohen Rauschpegels und vieler metallischer Oberflächen, die Multipfad-Effekte verursachen, sehr hohe Ansprüche an das Latenzverhalten und die Robustheit. Deshalb waren die Hauptziele die Reduzierung von Latenz und gleichzeitige Erhöhung der Robustheit für den existierenden, auf IR-UWB basierenden Standard IEEE 802.15.4a. Dieser Standard ist unter anderem deshalb vielversprechend, da er sich mit sehr preisgünstigen, nicht-kohärenten Empfängern von geringer Komplexität umsetzen lässt, die trotzdem relativ robust gegenüber Multipfad-Effekten sind. Es wurde gezeigt, dass sich auch mit diesen günstigen Geräten durch Optimierung des Standards eine hohe übertragungssicherheit bei geringer Latenz realisieren lässt. Es wurden Modifikationen zur Optimierung der Robustheit und Latenz des bisher üblichen Designs von nicht-kohärenten IR-UWB-Empfängern vorgestellt. Durch Ergänzungen zu der im Standard beschriebenen Modulation und Kodierung konnte die Verlässlichkeit zusätzlich gesteigert werden. Um diese optimierte PHY-Schicht effizient einsetzen zu können, wurde eine spezialisierte MAC-Schicht für die Automatisierung, die in einem Entwurf für den kommenden Standard IEEE 802.15.4e beschrieben wird, eingesetzt. Da bei dieser MAC-Schicht die Kommunikationsmuster im Voraus bekannt sind, war weitere schichtübergreifende, applikations-spezifische Optimierung möglich, die eine weitere Reduzierung der Latenz sowie eine Erhöhung der Robustheit erbrachte. Im Zuge der Arbeit wurde ein flexibel konfigurierbarer Simulator für IR-UWB auf Basis von industriell akzeptierten Kanalmodellen erstellt. Dieser Simulator wurde auch zur Evaluation und Verifikation der Forschungsergebnisse benutzt. Das entworfene Gesamtsystem ist über mehrere Parameter konfigurierbar und dadurch an weitere Anwendungen in der Automatisierung anpassbar. Eine dieser Konfigurationen wurde durch Simulation evaluiert. Sie zeigt mindestens die gleiche und zum Teil bessere Performance als bisherige drahtlose oder drahtgebundene Lösungen für die Sensor/Aktor-Ebene der Fertigungsautomatisierung, wie z.B. AS-Interface, Bluetooth I/O oder WISA. Für den repräsentativen Fall von 32 Teilnehmern mit jeweils einem Byte Prozessdaten erreicht sie eine Zykluszeit von 1,88 ms. Damit kann eine eine mittlere Reaktionszeit von 985 µs erreicht werden und eine harte Echtzeitschranke von 15 ms mit einer Fehlerwahrscheinlichkeit unter 10^-9 eingehalten werden. Das Kommunikationssystem wurde auch in Hardware auf FPGA-Basis implementiert. Da das benutzte analoge Front-End, ein früher Prototyp eines IEEE 802.15.4a-kompatiblen Front-Ends, noch keine repräsentativen Messungen zuließ, wurde die Funktion durch eine Basisbandverbindung über Kabel verifiziert.
In this thesis a novel Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) technique applicable to wireless communication systems and generally to datapath architectures is presented. The proposed concept is intended for point-to-point communication with very intensive but bursty data transfer. This concept is based on a request-driven operation of locally synchronous modules. The key idea is that a module can use the input request signal as its clock while receiving a burst of data. The developed GALS technique is applied to the design of an IEEE 802.11a compliant baseband processor with the aim to alleviate the problems of system integration, power consumption and electro-magnetic interference. The GALS design was compared with a synchronous version of the baseband processor. In our experimental setup we have measured a 1% reduction in dynamic power consumption, 30% reduction in instantaneous supply voltage variations, and 5 dB reduction in spectral noise.
During the last years, the asynchronous design style has been rediscovered as a potential solution to upcoming design issues in deep-submicron technologies. However, besides the lack of commercial tools supporting this design style, one major challenge is the test of asynchronous designs. Especially their event-driven behavior leads to problems during test. Basically, the timing of asynchronous circuits is determined by gate and wire delays that are sensitive to variations of environmental parameters (process, voltage and temperature). This leads to uncertainties in the timing of the responses. Consequently, standard commercial test systems cannot be used, because such systems read the responses at specific cycles and, therefore, could reject fault-free devices. Furthermore, available hardware testers are, in principle, not designed to react to signal events from the design-under-test as it is necessary to establish asynchronous communication via handshake signalling. As a result, even simple functional tests that only apply stimuli and read the responses of the design-under-test cannot be realized without preparatory measures. This work addresses these issues and proposes a concept to enable functional tests of asynchronous designs. The concept is based on a special test processor that provides generic interfaces used to establish asynchronous handshake communication with a device-under-test. By this, elastic functional tests can be realized that overcome the static timing of conventional tests and emulate the real operating environment of the design. Apart from the generic test processor architecture, an essential part of the concept deals with the establishment of the processor as a stand alone or embedded test equipment. A workflow is provided that describes how the device-under-test can be embedded into the test processor environment for performing the tests. Besides the interconnection between the asynchronous design and the test processor, this especially includes the generation of programs that realize the functional tests of the design. A methodology is introduced that generates the desired programs for the processor from a standard functional simulation of the design-under-test. Based on the generic concept, a framework including both a test processor implementation and the realization of the program generation is delivered. In order to evaluate the entire concept, this framework has been applied to functionally test an asynchronous arithmetic-logic-unit. In combination with additional experiments, conducted to determine the required resources, it has been shown that the introduced concept is a suitable approach to test asynchronous designs.
This thesis describes the complete design of a low cost 60 GHz front end in SiGe BiCMOS technology. It covers the topics of a system plan, designs of building blocks, designs of application boards and real environment tests. Different LNA and mixer topologies have been investigated and fabricated. Good agreements between measurements and simulations have been achieved by using the self-developed component models. A transceiver front end system is built based on these blocks. A heterodyne architecture with a 5 GHz IF is adopted because it is compatible with the standard IEEE 802.11a, which allows the reuse of some existing building blocks of the 5 GHz transceiver. The transceiver chips are assembled onto application boards and connected by bond-wires. Bond-wire inductances have been minimized by using a cavity and compensated by an on board structure. The front end has been tested by both QPSK and OFDM signals in an indoor environment. Clear constellations have been measured. This was the first silicon based 60 GHz demonstrator in Europe and the second in the world.
Mixed signal integrated circuits (MSICs) contain both analog and digital circuitry, integrated together on the same die. While this integration brings many benefits, it also gives rise to the issue of substrate noise coupling between the noisy digital circuitry and noise-sensitive analog circuitry. In order to counteract this issue, various substrate noise reduction methodologies had been developed so far. This thesis explores a new approach in substrate noise reduction – using a GALS (globally-synchronous, locally-asynchronous) design strategy for the digital part of a MSIC, in order to reduce the noise generation at its source. GALS architectures consist of several locally synchronous modules (LSMs) which communicate asynchronously to each other. By converting an initially synchronous architecture of digital circuitry into a GALS architecture, simultaneous switching noise generated by this circuitry can be reduced. While GALS had already been used for reducing other types of simultaneous switching noise, this is, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the first attempt to develop a GALS-based methodology for substrate noise reduction. In order to be able to theoretically analyze GALS-based methodologies for substrate noise suppression, corresponding models at high abstraction level for substrate noise generation and substrate noise propagation in lightly doped substrates (which is a type of substrate mostly used for MSICs) have been developed. These models have further been used for developing two new GALS-based substrate noise reduction methodologies: harmonic-balanced plesiochronous GALS partitioning (HB) and harmonic-and-area-based plesiochronous GALS partitioning with power domain separation (HAB). A theoretical analysis has shown that HB can reach substrate noise attenuation of up to 20log(M), where M is the number of LSMs of the resulting GALS system. On the other hand, the attenuation achievable by HAB depends on the distribution of switching current harmonics and area among the partitions, as well as from the substrate itself. For each of the two methodologies, a suitable partitioning procedure for a practical application has been developed; these partitionig procedures have been numerically evaluated in MATLAB. HB has further been embedded within the EMIAS CAD tool, where it has been evaluated on a real design example – a wireless sensor node. A special case of HAB for low frequencies has been applied for developing a test chip called SGE (power domain Separation and Galsification Experiment). The measurements on silicon have proved the applicability of the methodology.
The license-free 60 GHz band enables a new breed of wireless networks offering data rates in the range of one to a few Gigabit per second over short distances. This thesis investigates the performance of a 60 GHz system using coded OFDM modulation and directive antennas for the transmitter and receiver. The study includes the impact of the 60 GHz propagation channel, impairments of a frontend in Si-Ge technology and considerations with respect to an efficient implementation. A major part of the work consists in the specification of a physical layer, which is optimized for the given wireless link and enables an implementation with programmable logic devices at moderate clock speed. For the selection of a channel code, the performance of two coding schemes is compared for the 60 GHz channel. The first scheme consists of a standard convolutional code and an outer Reed-Solomon code, whereas the second scheme is made up of an LDPC code with similar complexity. The interleaving scheme for the convolutional code is optimized to yield best performance. Furthermore, algorithms are developed and simulated for all essential system components of the OFDM receiver. The implementation of these components is also considered. A new synchronization scheme is introduced, which offers a high degree of robustness at low complexity. In this scheme, the fine timing synchronization shares the same hardware resources as the channel estimator. This approach results in a significant reduction of chip area. A new tracking algorithm is developed, which adequately compensates for the fluctuations of carrier phase, timing and channel impulse response. Finally, the implementation of the FFT and Viterbi decoder is discussed. The system architecture of the receiver requires a high degree of parallel processing and uses a deep processing pipeline to keep the clock frequency low. It is shown how to combine the system components into an efficient system under these conditions. The performance of the complete system is investigated for the static and time-variant channel. It is shown that despite the low complexity and high latency, the system achieves good performance. The baseband processor has been realized as a narrowband version with 400 MHz channels and broadband version with 2 GHz channels and improved algorithms. This has been done on an FPGA platform.
It is predicted that, in the next years, wireless sensor networks could be massively deployed in a wide variety of application areas, such as agriculture, logistics, automation, or infrastructure monitoring. An extremely low power consumption, high dependability, and low cost are common requirements for sensor nodes in all these applications. This can be achieved only by tiny, power-efficient microcontrollers and communication systems integrated on a single chip. Formal description techniques, such as SDL (Specification and Description Language), are suitable to formally prove properties of models designed in these languages. Code generators facilitate the automatic transformation of SDL models into software implementations, while preserving the properties of the model and, thus, achieving high system dependability. The implementations consist of the translated state machine behavior and, additionally, require a run-time environment for model execution. The objective of this work was to investigate an integrated design flow for embedded systems, which should allow the development of efficient and dependable system implementations from abstract SDL specifications. In this thesis, concepts for minimal SDL run-time environment have been devised and realized by an example implementation. Not only pure software implementations should be considered, but starting from these also the hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning of the system should be supported. For this purpose, a cosimulation framework that allows the coupling of an instruction set simulator (ISS) with a functional SDL simulation has been investigated and prototypically implemented within the scope of this thesis. By shifting functionality to dedicated hardware components it is possible to take computational load from the microcontroller and to decrease the overall energy consumption by reducing the clock frequency and lowering the supply voltage. Due to the use of SDL, the design flow lends itself particularly to the implementation of communication protocols, and is limited to applications with soft real-time requirements. For an SDL-based design flow targeted to resource-constrained embedded systems, concepts and real implementations of minimal SDL run-time environments were lacking. Available software tools, indeed, enable the transformation of SDL models into C code, however for an efficient implementation, an integration into existing real-time operating systems (RTOS) for small microcontrollers is essential. A prototypical implementation of a run-time library for the Reflex RTOS has been created to validate our general concepts. It is about 30 % faster and consumes less than half of the program memory compared to the operating system independent run-time environment of the tool vendor Telelogic. For simple SDL models, the application requires in total less than 8 kbytes program memory and 1 kbyte RAM. For the evaluation of design alternatives that realize different hardware/software partitionings, instruction set simulators are particularly suitable. They facilitate the identification of performance bottlenecks of the HW/SW system. Test stimuli are required in order to measure the performance and response time of systems under design. The development of an environment that generates such test signals can be a laborious task. Thus, it is reasonable, especially in the design of protocols, to use an SDL simulation of a communication network to generate these test stimuli. Such an SDL model already exists and is the basis for the implementation. The protocol implementation simulated by the ISS then becomes part of the network simulation. An efficient coupling of SDL simulations with instruction set simulators had to be investigated, and a solution is presented in this thesis. Based on the general concepts, a cosimulation framework for the ISS TSIM for the LEON2 processor was realized by the author. The joint SDL and instruction set simulation is very fast, which could be demonstrated by connecting a software implementation of the complex IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol with an SDL simulation of a network consisting of four devices. The real execution time for 10 seconds of simulation time amounted to just 50 seconds. The overall design flow was validated by means of a HW/SW implementation of the IEEE 802.15.3 wireless MAC protocol. The author designed a complete SDL model of the protocol and integrated it into Reflex. By using our cosimulation environment for the TSIM simulator, the model was partitioned into hardware and software. For the hardware part, a dedicated protocol accelerator was designed by the author. This hardware component was integrated on a single chip with the LEON2 processor and, finally, manufactured. It could be shown that the presented methodology enables the design and implementation of efficient HW/SW systems. Consequently, it can be applied to the development of dependable and energy-efficient wireless sensor nodes and other embedded systems.
Wireless communication has become an indispensable part of our life and the demand for achieving higher throughput with lower energy consumption is ever growing. The ambitious throughput of 100 Gb/s and beyond is now becoming a modest goal thanks to comprehensive advances in transmission technologies and protocols. One important aspect of these advances is with regard to channel coding methods and the ability to detect and correct errors at the receiver. Computations needed by such methods become generally more complicated as they become more powerful in their performance. This imposes a great challenge for researchers attempting to devise practical methods for encoding and decoding Forward-error Correction (FEC) techniques tailored for high-throughput scenarios.
In this work we focus on high-throughput Quasi-Cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) codes, as they have been selected as one of the main FEC techniques for the two major next generation wireless technologies, namely Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) and 5G. Our target is to develop complete encoding and decoding design for these codes in order to reach the throughput of 100 Gb/s with affordable power consumption. Toward this goal, we investigate first the appropriate encoder design for these codes which can be used at such high data-rate with reasonably low power consumption. Then we propose several novel ideas for improving the decoding performance and complexity of QC-LDPC codes. The proposed novel ideas collectively facilitate a decoder able to run at 50 Gb/s with less than 12 pJ/b energy consumption for a Latin squares QC-LDPC code. All the proposed methods are practical and implementable and their effectiveness are showcased by either Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) or Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) synthesis.
Der Einsatz funkbasierter Steuerungs- und Überwachungssysteme wird sich in den nächsten Jahren in der Automatisierungsindustrie wesentlich erhöhen. Funkbasierte Systeme sind flexibel, das heißt skalierbar, leicht rekonfigurierbar und mobil. Außerdem sind Funksysteme kostengünstig, insbesondere bei der Wartung.
Dennoch müssen diese Systeme hohen Anforderungen genügen, wie Sicherheit, Zuverlässigkeit, Energieverbrauch, Geschwindigkeit und Wirtschaftlichkeit. Besonders wichtig für den Einsatz drahtloser Funktechnologien in Automatisierungssystemen ist die harte Echtzeitfähigkeit bei Zykluszeiten im Bereich von unter 1 ms bei Netzwerkgrößen von bis zu 127 Knoten bei einer bidirektionalen Kommunikation mit einer Nutzdatenmenge von bis zu 48 Byte je Sensorknoten. Eine weitere Herausforderung ist die Integration dieser Systeme in bestehende Infrastrukturen, wo Koexistenz mit bereits vorhandenen drahtlosen Systemen ein kritischer Faktor ist.
Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die IR-UWB Funktechnik basierend auf dem Standard IEEE 802.15.4a so zu verbessern, dass sie die hohen Anforderungen der Automatisierungsindustrie erfüllt. Dabei soll gewährleistet werden, dass die Abweichungen im Vergleich zum Standard möglichst gering ausfallen und dass die Vorgaben der Regulierungsbehörden nicht verletzt werden. Diese Anforderungen begrenzen die Möglichkeiten der Optimierungen stark, was die Aufgabe noch schwieriger macht, aber zugleich wird damit sichergestellt, dass die Lösungen auch in realen Systemen eingesetzt werden können.
In dieser Arbeit wurden sowohl komplexe theoretische Ansätze als auch Optimierungen der Implementierung ausgearbeitet, in Matlab simuliert und in einem FPGA implementiert. Anschließend wurde ein ASIC gefertigt.
Um die hohen zeitlichen Anforderungen zu erfüllen, wurden die einzelnen Teile des UWB-Frames optimiert. Um dies zu erreichen mussten neue Synchronisations- und Datenübertragungs-Verfahren entwickelt werden. Dieses Verfahren ermöglicht eine parallele bidirektionale Kommunikation mit einer variablen Anzahl an Sensorknoten (bis zu 127). Eine Kombination verschiedener Fehlerkorrekturverfahren (Reed-Solomon-Code und Hamming-Code) wurde untersucht, um die Zuverlässigkeit zu erhöhen. Zusätzlich wurde ein Fehlerkorrekturverfahren für ternäre Impulssequenzen mit geringem Overhead ausgearbeitet. Dieses Verfahren erlaubt eine ausreichend gute Fehlerkorrektur und erlaubt im Gegensatz zu der Fehlerkorrektur mit dem Reed-Solomon-Code das Einhalten der zeitlichen Anforderungen.
Das Hauptergebnis dieser Arbeit ist ein für IR-UWB optimiertes Übertragungskonzept, welches eine zuverlässige und energieeffiziente Datenübertragung von unter 1 ms für einen Master und 127 Slaves ermöglicht. Teile dieses Verfahrens wurden in Hardware gefertigt und experimentell evaluiert.
Wenn alle vorgeschlagenen Optimierungen verwendet werden, kann die Zykluszeit im Vergleich zum IEEE 802.15.4a Standard, um 95% reduziert werden. Der Energieverbrauch des gesamten Netzwerkes sinkt dabei um 65%.
Einige der vorgeschlagenen Verbesserungen wurden implementiert und für die übrigen wurde gezeigt, wie sie implementiert werden können. Der Einfluss weiterer Faktoren, wie die Umschaltzeit zwischen Sender und Empfänger, und deren Auswirkungen auf den Energieverbrauch wurden untersucht.
Im Rahmen dieser Doktorarbeit entstand eine standardkonforme IR-UWB Einzelchiplösung, die um Eigenschaften erweitert wurde, die vom Standard, abweichen, aber notwendig sind um die Anforderungen der Automatisierungsindustrie zu erfüllen.
Die gefertigte Variante der Einzelchiplösung enthält nicht alle in dieser Arbeit vorgeschlagenen Optimierungen, ist aber dennoch in der Lage die Zykluszeit um 57% zu verkürzen. Obwohl dieser Chip viele zusätzliche Features bietet, wurde die Komplexität und somit auch die benötigte Chipfläche um 43% reduziert.
The requirement for wireless communication with a speed beyond 100 Gbps is growing. There are mainly two possible approaches to achieve 100 Gbps system. One approach is to target lower transmission bandwidth and very high spectral efficiency. This method requires advanced digital signal processing operations, which are power-hungry. Another possible path is to go for a high-transmission bandwidth and a moderate spectral efficiency. We decided for this direction to implement a 100 Gbps system. We have chosen parallel sequence spread spectrum (PSSS) as an analog-friendly mixed-signal modulation where most of the baseband processing is in the analog domain, and only a small part is in the digital domain. For the channel equalization, we consider an “effective channel” that takes into account the wireless channel and the effects of the transmitter and receiver hardware impairments. The influence of the nonlinear channel response was analyzed for a PSSS modulated signal by employing the RAPP model for the power amplifier. For the first time, we performed a Hardware-In-The-loop experiment using PSSS modulation in the terahertz band. A PSSS modulated signal at a chip rate of 20 Gcps with spectral efficiency of 4 bit/s/Hz is transmitted using a 230 GHz RF-frontend operating in the linear range to achieve a data rate of 80 Gbps. One more important property is that the channel estimation and equalization are performed in the analog domain. A high-speed channel equalization algorithm was developed and implemented on FPGA/ASIC, which operates at(1/10)th of PSSS symbol rate. A parallel PSSS encoder transmitter architecture was designed to work at a high chip rate, and it was implemented on FPGA /ASIC and had an energy efficiency of 0.21 pJ bit−1 on 28nm ASIC.
In this Thesis, we put forward a case for the analog-friendly modulation scheme called PSSS. This scheme does not only modulates the signal but rather builds up an eco-system (such as channel estimation, equalization, and synchronization), which is responsible for the baseband operation.