Embedded Systems and Ambient Intelligence

Electronic technology has become the mainstay of any engineering system with complex functionality. Automobiles, air-planes, even everyday use objects such as pens and domestic appliances have an important electronic dimension, which is typically transparent to the users. For this reason, the electronic devices immersed in larger systems are called embedded systems. Among the most important functions embedded systems enable are control and monitoring of the operation of mechanical systems such as automotive engines or suspensions, chemical systems such as distillation towers, and communication systems such as cellular phones. Many embedded systems are safety critical, i.e., any malfunctioning may yield catastrophic outcomes for human health. The commercial importance of Embedded Controllers (EC) and of Embedded Systems in general has steadily grown in the past few years, opening unprecedented opportunities for improving the quality of the resulting products. The pervasiveness of these components is well illustrated by the following examples:

• the European automotive sector has a turnover of around 500 Billions Euro and it employs 2.7 million people in the EU. As of today, the 20\% of the value of each car is due to embedded electronics. This ratio is expected to increase to 35-40\% by 2015 creating more than 600.000 jobs in the automotive embedded systems alone (source ARTEMIS initiative)

• in the year 2005 the total amount of money spent in the EU for R&D activities in the Embedded systems areas is estimated in 20.000 millions Euro (19.750 from private investment and 250 from public investments). It is expected that in 2010 the total expenditure will overcome 28500 Millions Euro.

The development of EC is a very complex activity for a variety of reasons. The first problem is the presence of tight safety requirements. A failure of the system can even result in the loss of human lives. Moreover, fixing a problem in a system shipped in thousands of units can result in enormous additional costs for its manufacturer. Other issues such as time-to-market, cost of the deployed architecture, power consumption and memory footprint are also known to play a role of increasing importance. In short, designers and engineers are confronted with a challenge of overwhelming complexity: reliable (and often safety-critical) applications have to be developed in a short time using low-cost components. In order to cope with these challenging issues, an engineer operating in this domain must be provided with a wide body of knowledge, spanning over diverse scientific and technological disciplines. To build this knowledge, the faculty proposes a curriculum consisting of mandatory and optional courses. The mandatory courses cover the following cultural domains:

• Hardware/software platforms: the developer of embedded software has cost containment among his/her primary concerns. Hence, he/she needs foundational information on the main trade-offs present in hardware design and on how real-time computations can be performed even on low cost platforms. This information is conveyed by “advanced architectures” and “real-time operating systems”.

• Production of safety critical code: the correctness of the produced code is really the name of the game. Basic methodological skills on functional and temporal correctness will be offered in the “formal methods” and in the “real-time operating systems” courses.

• Networking: tomorrows embedded systems will be networked to an unprecedented extent. Particularly, wireless networking will take the lion share. Advanced information on wireless networking will be offered in the “nomadic communications” course:

• Signal and Systems: most embedded systems are used to process signals and implement control systems. A basic knowledge on this wide discipline will be offered in the Signal and Systems course.

You can find more detailed information on courses of study following the link