The 30th International Conference on Microelectronics

Due to major breakthroughs in software and engineering technologies, embedded systems are increasingly utilized in areas ranging from aerospace and next generation transportation systems, to smart grid and smart cities, to health care systems, and broadly speaking to what is known as Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). A CPS is primarily composed of several electronic, communication and controller modules and some actuators and sensors. The mix of heterogeneous underlying technologies poses a number of technical challenges to the design and, more severely, to the verification of such complex infrastructure. A CPS must adhere to strict safety, reliability, performance and security requirements, where one needs to capture both physical and random aspects of the various CPS modules and then analyze their interrelationship. Oftentimes, however, system bugs remain uncaught during the analysis and in turn cause unwanted scenarios that may have serious consequences in safety critical applications. This talk introduces some of the challenges surrounding the design and verification of contemporary CPS with the advent of smart technologies. In particular, it introduces recent developments in the use of formal methods for the modeling, analysis and verification of CPS and presents a few real world CPS case studies using physical components based on photonics integrated circuits.

Prof. Tahar is Professor and Senior Research Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He received his PhD in Computer Science with Distinction in 1994 from the University of Karlsruhe and his Diploma in Computer Engineering in 1990 from the University of Darmstadt, Germany. Prof. Tahar is founder and director of the Hardware Verification Group at Concordia University. He has made contributions and published over 400 papers in formal hardware verification, microprocessor and system on chip verification, analog and mixed signal circuits verification, VLSI design automation, and formal probabilistic, statistical and reliability analysis of systems.

Prof. Tahar has received several awards and distinctions, including Concordia University's Senior Research Award in 2007, earning him the title of University Fellow. In 2010, he was the recipient of a national Discovery Accelerator Award, given to the top 100 researchers in Canada in engineering and sciences. He is a member of the Order of Engineers of Quebec, a Senior Member of IEEE and a Senior Member of ACM.

The tutorial includes three major parts: Part 1, Introduction to Classical Machine Learning; Part 2, Introduction to Deep Learning; Part 3, Application to Common EDA Problems.

Dr. Eman El Mandouh is Quality Director for the IC Verification and Validation Solutions Division at Mentor Graphics, Siemens Business. She has more than 18 years of experience in digital design and functional verification technology, including simulation based verification, advanced formal verification solutions, coverage driven verification, intelligent test generation, and FPGA prototype and debugging. She received her PhD in 2023 from Cairo University in Computer Engineering, where she also obtained her BSc and MSc. Her PhD thesis explored machine learning techniques in the functional verification field. She has published a number of articles in functional verification, machine learning, data mining and big data techniques with function verification and software testing.

As quality manager for EDA, Eman has been certified by world quality institutes, including Green Belt Six Sigma for Information Technology and Software Engineering from the European Software Institute (ESI) and Quality Manager and Organizational Excellence from the American Society for Quality.

Automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are taking more control of Electronic Control Unit (ECU) hardware and software architecture definition and exploration, mainly due to the rise of new technologies in ADAS and autonomous vehicles. The increasing number of cars with ECUs containing tens of processors, and the need to accelerate the simulation of thousands of driving scenarios and design parameters to ensure safety and reliability in autonomous driving, has expanded the use of hardware emulation in the loop based on its capacity and functional verification merits. This presentation introduces an integrated heterogeneous system of systems framework to simulate and verify multiple ECUs. The framework allows co development of the automotive system application software, operating system and controller hardware together with the mechanical system actuators, sensors, and the physical world environment and traffic scenarios all in one. A comprehensive manual and automatic braking system use case consisting of four ECUs at different levels of abstraction demonstrates the tools and interface technologies developed in house and integrated with third party tools. The first dashboard ECU acts as a CAN frame monitor and exerciser. The second engine control ECU is modeled as a virtual platform running an AUTOSAR software stack and engine control application. The third transmission controller ECU (digital subsystem) is modeled in Register Transfer Language (RTL) and a Bare Metal application on a RISC V running in a hardware emulator. The mechanical part of the braking system is modeled and exported as a Functional Mockup Unit (FMU) and connected to the hardware emulator using an FMI Transport Application (FMITAP) based on SystemC TLM 2.0 and FMI 2.0. The fourth ADAS Control ECU is modeled as a virtual platform running an automated emergency braking system application. This platform is wrapped as an FMU and imported together with sensor and ADAS scenarios. The effect of a crossing traffic scenario can be simulated, tracked and analyzed in all ADAS control loop elements.

Dr. Ashraf Salem is Engineering Director at Mentor Graphics Egypt. He manages a group of 200 engineers working on the development of emulation, simulation, embedded systems and automotive products. Dr. Salem obtained his PhD from Grenoble University, France, in 1992. He received his BSc and MSc in Computer Engineering from Ain Shams University in 1983 and 1987, respectively. He was the CEO of the Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) and professor of Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University. Dr. Salem participated in the establishment of the ANACAD branch in Egypt in 1995, which was later acquired by Mentor Graphics and became one of the largest multinational development centers.

Dr. Salem participated in the establishment of the Software Engineering Competence Center and the Information Technology Institute in Egypt. He has published more than 120 scientific articles in computer aided design of digital circuits. He chaired technical committees at a number of international conferences and supervised more than 20 PhD and MSc theses in digital design and embedded systems. He also participated in a number of international research projects and developed one of the pioneer research products for formal verification in the 1980s.