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The demand for engineering graduates is increasing globally. National governments understand the importance of the sector for economic growth, while students are becoming more aware of the greater life opportunities open to them as a result of an engineering education. The role of effective teaching in the attainment of student outcomes is increasingly recognized and many engineering departments require...
Globally there have been many changes in the roles of universities, in particular the increasing complexity of the university's relationship with the state and society; it is thus unsurprising that there is a growing pressure on engineering programs to become more inclusive, innovative and ‘relevant’ to social needs. This study arises out of a call in South Africa, for the ‘decolonization’ of higher...
This paper reports on development of a bird call recognition application and signal processing coding framework referred to as the “Bird Call Heuristic-based Identification and Recognition Program” (B-CHIRP for short). The aim of this project was development of an application that serves two purposes: provides a system to assist novice birders in the identification of birds based on their sounds,...
Domain specific languages (DSLs) offer the potential for using a small, specialized and highly expressive programming language to concisely represent solutions for a particular domain of problems. The DSL approach is in stark contrast to that of a general programming language that attempts to provide a means to represent solutions for a broad range of problems. DSLs may incorporate constructs and...
This paper presents on the objectives and strategies to develop ALCHA: a new object-oriented FPGA programming model and language. ALCHA is aimed at unifying the various aspects of FPGA firmware design (RTL design, finite state machines, timing and design constraints, as well as scripting) into a single language. The ALCHA language is designed to minimise boiler-plate code and use concise syntax in...
This paper presents the use of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for Software Defined Radio (SDR) in a Radar digital signal processing (DSP) using heterogeneous computing architectures (HCAs). These HCAs are a combinations of mul-ticore CPU, GPUs, and FPGAs. This DSL, which we named OptiSDR, uses a dataflow-like model of computations named parallel stream processing and a compiler guided optimization...
This paper concerns design and performance testing of an HDL module called SwaMURAy that is a configurable, high-speed data sequencing and flow control module serving as an intermediary between data acquisition (or pre-processing) and subsequent processing stages. While a FIFO suffices for many applications our case needed a more elaborate solution to overcome legacy design limitations. The SwaMURAy...
Advances in integrated circuit technology are enabling construction of increasingly more powerful architectures for Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms. For instance multicores, multiprocessor System-on-Chip and FPGAs provide opportunities for innovative prototyping and increased programmability whereby more radio processing is done in the digital domain. But there are challenges with these technologies,...
The ability to estimate positions of sound sources is one that gives animals a 360° awareness of their acoustic environment. This helps complement the visual scene which is restricted to 180° in humans. Unfortunately, deaf people are left out on this ability. Smart phones are rapidly becoming a common tool amongst mobile users in developed and emerging markets. Their processing ability has more than...
In this paper, we present a domain-specific language, referred to as OptiSDR, that matches high level digital signal processing (DSP) routines for software defined radio (SDR) to their generic parallel executable patterns targeted to heterogeneous computing architectures (HCAs). These HCAs includes a combination of hybrid GPU-CPU and DSP-FPGA architectures that are programmed using different programming...
South African higher education has, for the last twenty years, attempted to confront the legacy its past, particularly the lack of access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics-based (STEM) education by the vast majority of potential students. The current policy environment is dominated by a drive towards high skills jobs and innovation that links research to new forms of production and...
Computer-aided plant identification combines computer vision and pattern recognition. The Cape Floristic Kingdom is the most varied of plant kingdoms, comprising thousands of species of fynbos plants. While it is easier to classify fynbos when they are flowering, mostly flower for only a few weeks in a year. This paper concerns an image processing application for automatic identification of certain...
The objective of this paper is to present the RHINO ARM API Cluster Control System (RAACMS) that will enable a user to access and control networked Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for computing and radio (RHINO) platforms. The framework is designed to run on a reconfigurable platforms consisting of FPGA and an ARM processor connected in a cluster. This system is built around a client-server design,...
The Rhino Project is a response to the need for Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms for training and research. Presented in this paper is a toolflow for rapidly prototyping SDR applications upon Rhino. This Toolflow allows for end-users to describe their SDR application in a high level manner and then take it through various levels of abstraction, validated at each transition point, with a resulting...
This paper concerns the development of a real-time, reconfigurable hardware triggering system that aims to facilitate setting up and capturing of data from nuclear physics experiment done at iThemba LABS in South Africa. This system replaces an analogue triggering system that involved time-consuming configuration tasks of Nuclear Instrumentation Module (NIM) circuitry. The new system is a model-integrated...
This paper concerns development of a pulsed-Doppler radar system prototyping framework designed for deployment on the Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for computiNg and radiO (Rhino) platform. The Rhino platform combines a low-cost Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and an ARM processor, designed for use in prototyping Software Defined Radio applications. The Rhino is intended as both a training...
Graphical visualisation, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and reuse of intellectual property are established methods for increasing the speed and productivity of FPGA system design. Many commercial EDA products for FPGA development use graphical visualisation of Hardware Description Language (HDL) code to assist engineers. However, these tools usually don't abstraction clock or bus signals...
This paper provides a novel way of trading increased resource utilisation for decreased latency when computing a single Discrete Fourier Transform on the FPGA. Analysis conducted on the Cooley-Tukey FFT optimisation shows that it increases the number of operations in the critical path of the transform computation. Consequentially an algorithm is proposed which allows control over the degree to which...
This paper addresses the problem of multisensor data fusion for target tracking using a Doppler radar with range rate measurements and an Electro-Optic (EO) camera. We present three fusion architectures, named FA1-FA3, to perform data fusion using the above mentioned sensors. FA1 and FA2 are distributed fusion architectures employing the information matrix fusion method with dynamic feedback. In FA1,...
This paper reports on a study focused on smart energy management using advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The paper digs into AMI communication standards understood and proposed by power utilities and regulators. Furthermore, the paper discusses a study of different AMI communication networks architectures designed by various proprietors and compares these system architectures with requirements...
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