Hardware/Software co-design, implementation and testing of embedded systems in challenging applications

Nowadays embedded systems are commonly deployed in a wide range of applications. These special-purpose computing systems are designed to perform a target function, or a class of functions, having distinctive constraints related to the intended application and form factor, power and performance, system resources and features, affordable cost, and assumptions about end-user behaviour. Differently from the general-purpose systems, embedded systems are not programmable by the end-user. In this sector, the design engineers have two primary goals. First, to build up a system able to perform the required computation and to meet the user needs without violating the imposed constraints. Second, to optimize the general performance, the effectiveness, the reliability, the size and the cost of the final system. Because all design metrics are connected and depending on hardware/software partitioning and interaction among hardware and software components, the abstraction of separating software from hardware does not work. Instead, a co-design approach that starts from the hardware/software partitioning and includes paradigms from hardware and software design and implementation in integrated fashion is required to maximize the success of the final system. This work presents the research achievements in the field of embedded systems for telemedicine, assistive technology and high-performance computing applications, particularly focused on human-machine interfaces and architectural aspects. For each system the requirements and challenges, the golden design metrics and the desired integration level have been defined, starting from the end-user needs. Then the hardware/software co-design, implementation and testing phases have been completed. The first system is an interactive gateway for telemonitoring of vital signs using non-invasive biomedical sensors characterized by its usability and the integration with the electronic health record. The second study concerns a heavy parallel digital signal processing platform, originally conceived for space applications, that provides a significant increase of performance with respect to its predecessors.