Applications in Electronics Pervading Industry, Environment and Society

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

2. Internet of Things

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Enabling Predictive Maintenance on Electric Motors Through a Self-sustainable Wireless Sensor Node

      Andrea Bentivogli, Tommaso Polonelli, Michele Magno, Guido Comai

      Abstract

      Periodic maintenance and unpredictable equipment failure of industrial machinery are expensive elements in a company’s balance and potentially hazardous for human operators. Periodic inspections at predefined intervals are commonly applied to limit unplanned production downtime and safety concerns. The latest advancements in smart sensor technology enables online equipment monitoring that can directly anticipate the deterioration and incoming breakages on operating machines, reducing maintenance costs. This paper presents a deploy and forget sensor node for predictive maintenance on industrial electric motors, which targets three-phase asynchronous motors, supporting the data collection from multiple sensors, such as vibrations, environmental noise, temperature, and the external magnetic field. The sensor node features ultra-low-power design, achieving self-sustainability by exploiting a 4\(\,\times \,\)4 cm thermal electric generator with a \(\varDelta T\) of \(20\,^\circ \text {C}\) for at least 72 s. Moreover, it features short-long wireless data transfer over WiFi and the NB-IoT protocol. Results report the energy harvesting efficiency and the circuit power consumption from a real-world tests.

   3. Efficient Uploading of.Csv Datasets into a Non-Relational Database Management System

      Matteo Fresta, Francesco Bellotti, Alessio Capello, Marianna Cossu, Luca Lazzaroni, Alessandro De Gloria, Riccardo Berta

      Abstract

      Measurement-oriented non-relational databases often have a fixed structure schema to better manage and guarantee integrity of their data. However, this leads to a redundancy of field values into the database or does not allow storing most of the existing measurement files. We propose a solution to massively load various format.csv datasets without requiring any user modification of the original file. The core of the solution is given by a key-value pair.json file mapping the database resources to the.csv columns, and adding further context information, if not already present. The solution aims at effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility. The implemented module has been successfully tested in a couple of use cases using existing datasets.

   4. Microcontroller Based Edge Computing for Pipe Leakage Detection

      Fulvio Lo Valvo, Giacomo Baiamonte, Giuseppe Costantino Giaconia

      Abstract

      In the embedded system field a correct resource management is crucial, especially in systems that use Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. The resources in that case are in terms of memory, footprint and time used to compute the tasks. The system should be able to be both accurate and compact although the precision is directly proportional to the memory used to storage data. In this paper we describe a comparison between three ML models implemented in a microcontroller, with an application scenario devoted to monitor a Water Distribution Network by using vibrations input and trying to investigate the computational complexity of each tested solution.

   5. eSysId: Embedded System Identification for Vibration Monitoring at the Extreme Edge

      Federica Zonzini, Matteo Zauli, Luca De Marchi

      Abstract

      Enabling extreme edge processing functionalities will lead a breakthrough in the development of the next generation of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems, thanks to the adoption of sensor–near data analtycs which will make the structural inference process faster and more advantageous in terms of power consumption and data volume. In this work, we specifically endorse this paradigm in the context of vibration–based diagnostics by proposing a novel, intelligent accelerometer sensor combining, in an embedded device, advanced edge data analytics implementing System Identification algorithms, and energy–aware custom hardware supporting it. The effect of the bit–depth quantization of the collected signal on the quality of the retrieved structural parameters is assessed; moreover, a cost–benefit analysis is also encompassed, showing how the developed solution might be globally more advantageous from an energy point of view, reaching up to 10x power saving if compared with standard alternatives.

   6. Microcontroller Based Portable Measurement System for GaN and SiC Devices Characterization

      Alberto Vella, Giuseppe Galioto, Giuseppe Costantino Giaconia

      Abstract

      The aim of this work is to design and implement an embedded system capable to characterize some relevant figures of merit of Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide transistors in a wide range of frequencies. In particular, the designed system is focused on measuring the parameters involved in both the power loss phenomena and the reliability of the device during switching operations. Both the employment of a low-cost microcontroller unit and the equivalent-time sampling technique contributed to make the measurement system flexible, affordable and capable of enhanced sampling performance. As a result, different GaN and SiC devices were compared, in order to characterize the behavior of the measured quantities with respect to the switching frequency.

   7. Design-Time Tool for Energy Harvesting Solutions

      Alessandro Bertacchini, Yuri Ricci

      Abstract

      A Matlab-LTSpice based tool is presented in this paper. It has been developed to help the designer to add Energy Harvesting (EH) capabilities to a generic electronic device that is being developed. The realized easy-to-use tool allows to quick evaluate several EH solutions at design time, contributing to considerably reduce both design time and costs because no hardware prototypes are needed. The tool is based on a set of pre-designed EH circuits covering all the main EH sources available in industrial applications (i.e. light, thermal gradients and vibrations) and drives the designer in the choice of the most suitable one accordingly with both the estimated environmental working conditions and the estimated power consumption profile of the specific electronic device that is being developed.

   8. Design and Validation of an Electronic Unit for Monitoring Water Distribution in Plastic Pipes

      Christian Riboldi, Daniele M. Crafa, Marco Carminati

      Abstract

      A modular IoT node for monitoring water distribution with non-invasive sensors (ultrasonic flow rate and leakage) applied to plastic pipes is presented. It combines miniaturization and low-power design (380 µWh for a 1-h transmission period) with the potential to connect multiple remote units to the central one with powering and serial communication through the same 4 copper strip electrodes used for impedimetric leakage detection.

3. Hardware Acceleration

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Design and Implementation on FPGA of a HW Accelerator for Post-Quantum RLWE Polynomial Operations

      Stefano Di Matteo, Sergio Saponara, Riccardo Locatelli

      Abstract

      Ring learning with errors (RLWE) is largely adopted in Post-Quantum cryptography and Homomorphic encryption schemes. RLWE cryptosystems are defined over polynomial quotient rings, where polynomial additions/subtractions and multiplication are required. In this paper we propose the implementation of a hardware accelerator for polynomial operations required in RLWE cryptosystems. Such hardware accelerator includes a Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) able to perform polynomial additions/subtractions and multiplications. The latter adopts Negative Wrapped Convolution (NWC) and Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) techniques. The hardware accelerator has been integrated in a hardware system for accelerating the NewHope-1024 algorithm, and a demo on a Intel DE4 FPGA board has been developed to test the functionality of the system. Synthesis results on different FPGA technologies are proposed too, showing competitive performances respect to the State of Art.

   3. A Novel Front-End Circuit for the Digital Conversion of QCM-D Responses for FPGA-Based Frequency Measurements

      Tommaso Addabbo, Ada Fort, Elia Landi, Riccardo Moretti, Marco Mugnaini, Valerio Vignoli

      Abstract

      This work presents a front-end circuit aimed at enhancing the performance of counter-based digital frequency meters for Quartz Crystal Microbalances with Dissipation Monitoring (QCM-D) applications. The proposed electronics converts the QCM-D vanishing sinusoidal transient response into a square wave signal with voltage levels compliant with standard digital I/O ports. The front-end electronics is designed to preserve the QCM-D response oscillation frequency during the analog-to-digital conversion by means of an Automatic Gain Control (AGC) amplifying stage.

   4. A FPGA HardWare Architecture for AZSPWM Based on a Taylor Series Decomposition

      Andrea Donisi, Luigi Di Benedetto, Rosalba Liguori, Gian Domenico Licciardo, Alfredo Rubino

      Abstract

      The parer illustrates a new efficient FPGA hardware architecture for the Active Zero State Pulse Width Modulation, which exploits the Taylor Series to decompose the dwell-times expressions. This decomposition avoids further resources, like external reference signals or Digital Signal Processor, as well as specific architectures, like CORDIC core or Look Up Table-based approaches, which are all solutions provided by the state of the art. All the calculations are done by a fixed-point Arithmetic Logic Unit, which can perform a real time variation of the output amplitude.

      The architecture has been implemented on a Xilinx Artix VII FPGA XC7A35T1CPG236C requiring 1973 LUTs and 501 Flip Flops, respectively, the \(9.49\%\) and \(1.20\%\) of the overall resources, and a dynamic power consumption of 1 \(\textrm{mW}\).

   5. Analysis, Design and Synthesis of an Execution Tracing Unit (ETU) Based on AUTOSAR Run-Time Interface (ARTI)

      Francesco Cosimi, Fabrizio Tronci, Sergio Saponara, Paolo Gai

      Abstract

      Complex vehicle applications and the need of reducing the number of processing units are giving audience to virtualization on multicore devices. Such solution offers flexibility, but it is challenging in terms of timing predictability and resources partitioning. This explains why timing analysis is a crucial topic for Functional Safety. A knowledge of tasks and their behavior, applied at debug or runtime, allows balancing resources, refining scheduling and understanding the issues of a safety critical system. In the paper, we present the Execution Tracing Unit (ETU), a hardware support to AUTOSAR Run-Time Interface (ARTI), whose scope is to define an interface between tracing and analysis tools. The hardware element introduces a limited overhead if synthetized for an xczu9eg FPGA device. Meanwhile, simulations demonstrated that the peripheral is able to manage occurring software items with a very fast activation rate (an average of 4 clock cycles between two subsequent activations).

   6. A Side Channel Attack Methodology Applied to Code-Based Post Quantum Cryptography

      Kristjane Koleci, Lorenzo Cecchetti, Guido Masera, Maurizio Martina, Massimo Ruo Roch

      Abstract

      The present work proposes a Side Channel Attack that targets the multiplier of a code-based Post Quantum Cryptography primitive. The Secret Key has been recovered with the Correlation Power Analysis obtained with the use of a methodology that simulates the power consumption profile of a design and then validates the method with the real device. The methodology is proposed as a useful tool to study weaknesses of designs during their design phase.

   7. A 2 GHz Wide Tuning Range LC-Tank Digitally Controlled Oscillator in 28 nm CMOS Technology

      G. Ciarpi, G. Puccioni, M. Mestice, D. Monda, D. Rossi, S. Saponara

      Abstract

      This work presents the design, in 28 nm CMOS technology, of an integrated LC-tank Digitally Controlled Oscillator (DCO) operating around 2 GHz with a wide tuning range between 1.24 GHz and 2.51 GHz. The DCO, implemented with N- and P-cross-coupled MOSFETs, uses two capacitor banks, one fine and the other coarse, to cover all the frequency range with a minimum resolution of about 10 MHz. A digital gain control solution was also implemented to guarantee the startup and sustainment of the oscillation even in the worst conditions. The reported post-layout simulation results confirm compliance with the DCO constraints.