Other
Reco-LWC: Reconfigurable Lightweight Crypto for IoT applications
AS005 »
NIST announced the finalist who are participating the Lightweight Cryptographic competition for securing small devices which is targeting Internet of Things applications. We are planning to build a reconfigurable processor which runs all of the 10 candidates on FPGA using dynamic reconfiguration. The proposed processor will be evaluated using DE10-Nano Cyclone V SoC FPGA Board
and also Microsoft Azure IoT on both software and hardware perspectives
Other: Hardware Acceleration
輕量型卷積神經網路之硬體加速器設計
PR008 »
本研究提出透過軟硬體協同設計(hardware software co-design)將卷積神經網路(Convolutional Neural Network, CNN)加速器實現於FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array, FPGA)中的方法。本研究主要分成三個部分來實現：在硬體方面，(1)透過Avalon 匯流排將卷積神經網路模型中的遮罩、權重參數與影像載入至處理單元模組中，進行CNN中卷積與池化的運算，(2)處理單元模組的設計透過平行處理架構提升模組的運算效能，並且透過遮罩與權重的重複使用和定點數運算，有效節省記憶體空間的使用。而在軟體方面，(3)透過NIOS實現CNN中的全連結層，並將此模組與相關硬體模組進行整合，進而實現完整的CNN加速器。從實驗結果可以得知，本文提出的設計架構可以有效提升模型運算效能，並且能夠節省記憶體空間使用量。
Other: Wildlife and forest preservation
iFireFighter
AP006 »
Humanity is currently facing a very major problem, something that has the potential to drastically reduce our population and ruin the lives of our future generations: Climate Change. Due to increased intensity of climate change and lack of any meaningful effort to tackle it, the corresponding problems that accompany the phenomenon of climate change are worsening year by year.
One of these problems that has set the world ablaze are forest fires. The frequency, intensity, and area affected of forest fires are steadily increasing every year. It’s like every year the California wildfires or the Australian bushfires are more intense and cause more damage than the last year’s.
Once a fire has reached critical mass and spread beyond a certain limit, it’s extremely costly, time consuming, and takes a lot of manpower and effort to get it under the control. The natural remedy for tackling this issue is to nip the problem in the bud before it has a chance to blossom.
All major wildfires and forest fires start from a much smaller localized fire that once they reach a critical mass, grow out of control. Our project proposes to detect and alert the relevant authorities about these localized fires before they grow out of control.
Fighting a fire after it has grown past critical mass is extremely costly. From the equipment to the resources to the manpower and personnel, along with the potential for an immense loss of human life, a lot of money must be thrown at the problem to get the fire back under control.
Our project would reduce these costs massively since the focus would then shift from getting a raging uncontrollable fire back under control to quickly and efficiently extinguishing a much smaller fire before it spreads.
Other: Agriculture & Water Sustainability
Water Stress Detection using Aerial & Metrological Data(Agri-Bird)
AP008 »
Water is essential in agriculture. Farms use it to grow fresh produce and to sustain their livestock. Major environmental functions and human needs critically depend on water. In regions of the world affected by water scarcity economic activities can be constrained by water availability, leading to competition both among sectors and between human uses and environmental needs.
According to a 2017-18 government survey, agriculture contributes to 18.9% of the GDP and uses up 42.3% of the labor force in Pakistan. But with agriculture using up about 90% of Pakistan’s water supply, and Pakistan’s water crisis threatening to exhaust the country’s water resources by 2040, there is a dire need for solutions that help in the efficient use of water in agriculture, and farming in particular.
To combat this problem and provide a sustainable mechanism to farmers, we propose an aerial collection and soil-sampling data framework that will lead to sustainable, precise, secure, and efficient farming. Our solution will focus on the water-stress or drought-stress of plants.
Water stress refers to the water deficit in plants and has shown to be a very useful piece of information in farming. In addition to being a good predictor for the yield of the plantation, water stress also allows us to respond timely to areas that are under-watered or over-watered. Of course, water stress is most valuable as information for planning irrigation, but it can also be a very decent measure of areas that are at risk of wildfires.
Our solution proposes to mount an FPGA to the aerial unit where it will be collecting data with the help of modules, subsequently process it on the edge, and then transfer all the relevant data to the cloud for further processing and analysis. In order to give our results more credibility, we will also be collecting some soil-sampled data and combining it with the aerial data to give us our final results in the cloud. Our results will aim to give accurate predictions, useful suggestions to farmers, routing data for irrigation channels, and warnings for risks and disasters.
Smart City
Smarthome Control System
PR009 »
Smart home has become a trend of housing in the future. At present, most smart home control systems are closed systems developed by major developers. With specific interfaces and communication protocols, they cannot be well managed when they have problems like not receiving real-time data from sensors when there are too many devices.
The design is intended to implement smart home control and data acquisition in the house covered with Wi-Fi with FPGA Cloud Connectivity Kit platform based on DE10-Nano. Data monitoring and smart home remoting control functions are implemented with Microsoft Azure IoT and AI tools in cloud.
Health
Phase dependent retina stimulation
EM006 »
We try to build a FPGA based solution to stimulate retinal tissue phase dependently of the overlaying local field potentials. By this we want to increase the stimulation efficiency and thus decrease the power consumption of the device.
Industrial
LIDAR
AP013 »
Laser imaging, detection, and ranging (LIDAR), is a method for measuring the distance to a targeted object in space. This works by aiming a laser at an object then firing pulses of light and receiving these using a light sensor next to the laser. The time it takes to receive the reflected light pulses can then be utilized to determine the distance of the object.
This project will utilize a laser that can be optically steered to aim in any direction. By scanning the lasers in every direction, a 3-dimensional image can be generated that gives a complete view of all surrounding obstacles. The ideal application for such a system is within self-driving cars, to detect other vehicles and pedestrians. This is also useful for 3d mapping either on land or underwater.
The Cloud Connectivity kit is ideal for this application as it includes an FPGA that is able to rapidly process the laser measurements in real-time which is essential for an application such as autonomous vehicles. The Wi-Fi connectivity combined with the Azure IoT application makes the platform even more powerful by allowing for results to be stored and processed further and then visualized to derive useful insights.
Water Related
sustainable fishery
AP014 »
Our venture is coming up with the cutting edge End-to-End product which can help the marine species and over a 5-10 years course wild capture would be rejuvenated naturally with the ultimate solution what we offer with the existing Hardware/Software but integrating and applying it for a unique way.
Blind Fishing and overfishing has made the marine resources / wild capture as no longer a bottom less fishing.
This overfishing put a trouble to 1/3 of world population especially the under-developed and developing countries who rely ocean as their cheap protein.
Other: FPGA Based On Network On Chip
ReDeNOC :ReConfigurable Device for Network On Chip
AP016 »
Field programmable gate array (FPGA) is become one of the best way in looking the functionality of a integrated circuit. We can download any logic to an FPGA and test the logic quite easily and then if the design is correct then we can go in for an ASIC design if required. Also if the logic is going to change very frequent then the logic can be downloaded to a FPGA and used a chip.
Network on chip is a new dimension in VLSI design wherein we use a network for transfer of information rather than a bus structure which would be slow in working as the logic of implementation goes high. Many topologies like mesh, torus etc. were introduced area of network on chip in the beginning. These topologies became slow when the logic of the system grow. For this a new topology called RiCoBiT (Ring Connected Binary Tree) was introduced in this area. This topology is better in terms of the hop count by keeping the area the same as mesh or torus.
The project we are doing, will give a new dimension for FPGA based design. Here we are going to use the concept of FPGA with network on chip. We are designing a new reprogrammable device like a FPGA using RiCoBiT topology.
Food Related
Sustainable, Safe and Profitable farming using FPGA
AP019 »
A farmer’s job is quite hard. Good results depend on several factors such as the type of Soil, Water, Fertilisers, Pesticides. Excessive use of chemicals can damage a crop and can also cause harm to its consumers. To top it off, global warming has created unpredictable weather patterns and has the potential to destroy entire seasons of crops without much notice.
To solve this we will build out a system that will be able to predict the outcome of a crop season based on the various information we will collect. This system will be able to guide the farmer to use the right amount of water, fertilizer, pesticides. Predict the correct intervals to use these. Be able to detect important threats such as unexpected rodents and suggest corrective measures. The system will also be keeping account of the changing weather patterns and suggest deviations accordingly.
The system will use sensors and cameras to collect the following information from the field for real time prediction:
# Soil Properties
# Localized Weather Properties
# Collect images of the plantation and nearby areas
# Images of chemicals use, if possible quantity of chemicals used by sensors
# Water properties
# Macro weather condition
We will build out the model using the data provided by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer’s Welfare, Government of India and various other open data sets. The model itself will be using KNN Algorithm. It is widely used in text categorization, predictive analysis, data mining and image recognition and will be suitable for our use case.
We will use KNN algorithm on FPGA based heterogeneous computing systems using OpenCL. Based on FPGA's parallel pipeline structure. Use of FPGA will improve the efficiency of the solution compared to a conventional GPU based KNN algorithm implementation.
Marine Related
AI based Coral Reefs monitor
AP020 »
This project is an implementation of a Neural Network on the FPGA platform to monitor coral reefs and updates the details on a cloud-based dashboard. Also, ocean parameters like salinity, pH, dissolved oxygen, the temperature can also be monitored. This device would be a small battery-powered submarine that would go to selected regions in the oven and collect the data from those regions. The submarine would be autonomous but we would also provide manual control via satellite communication in case of issues. The dashboard can be used to view the route, elapsed time, available battery, and the data being collected by the submarine.
Water Related
FPGA-based Irrigation System for Soft Fruit Farms
EM007 »
Prototype of an Intel FPGA-based automatic irrigation system for soft fruit farms in Perthshire, Angus and Fife, Scotland, UK