Research

The focus of our current research activities is on design and verification of Embedded Systems and Systems-on-Chip (SoC). We are interested in both the hardware and the low-level software (firmware) of the systems. Some of our research projects are particularly focussed on the interaction between hardware and software.

Besides targeting traditional design goals such as high performance and low power consumption, a particular objective of our research is to make contributions to achieving functional safety and security of the designed and manufactured systems. The requirement of functional safety and security is driven by an increased use of embedded systems technology in safety- and security-critical applications such as in avionics and in automotive systems (e.g., autonomous cars). Another driver of this research field are new manufacturing techniques in “smart factories” (Industry 4.0) which impose new challenges on the safety of embedded systems technology as well as on the confidentiality of the data being processed.

Current research topics are:

  • Correct-by-Construction Embedded System Design using "Property-First Design" [more]
  • HW/SW cross-layer techniques for Safety Analysis [more]
  • Binary-level embedded software verification [more]
  • Hardware Security with respect to microarchitectural attacks [more]