Design of embedded digital systems for data handling and elaboration in industrial and scientific applications

Nowadays, in several research fields, both industrial and scientific, fast and efficient data handling and elaboration is more and more important, especially in view of the more and more growing expansion of systems that manage in real-time a large amount of multi-media data. With data handling and elaboration it is possible to define an big number of data manipulations (arithmetic-logic calculation, compression, numerical filtering, storing, transmission, etc) executed by one or more hardware/software systems within different applications. In the first phase of this thesis work the concepts at the bottom of data handling and elaboration will be introduced and the various typologies of "Embedded" systems will be discussed, focusing mainly over the typologies treated in this thesis work. Subsequently, the three embedded platforms designed will be treated in detail: the inertial/GPS platform, based on two 8-bit microcontrollers, for the acquisition of data coming from many sensors (thermometers, accelerometers and gyroscopes) and for the management of other devices (GPS module and ZigBee module); the emulation FPGA-based platform to conduct functional test on serial communication interfaces, based on the new FF-LYNX protocol, modelized firstly in System-C and then implemented on FPGA, to be used within high energy physics experiments; the FPGA-based calculation platform. named DCMARK, that uses a CNN (Cellular Neural Network) approach to rapidly solve non-linear differential equation at the bottom of complex dynamical systems. All these works brought to interesting scientific results within the design of embedded devices. In particular, the inertial/GPS system demonstrated to be an efficient platform usable in different fields such as body motion recognition, fall detection, aerial photogrammetry, inertial navigation, etc and new ideas may be born after the deep integration of system; the emulation system which allowed to validate and verify the proper working of communication interfaces of FF-LYNX protocol, proving to be an investigation instrument faster and more reliable than high level simulation; the DCMARK calculation system which, using an innovative multi-processor approach, allowed to tackle the solving of non-linear differential equation up to ten times more quickly than the more modern multi-core processors.