Student (f/m/x) - Design and implementation of a safe AXI DMA Ethernet

Welcome to the Institute of Flight Systems. Our work focuses on the interaction between aircraft configuration, pilots and modern flight system technology. From flight dynamics to unmanned aerial vehicles, from simulation to real flight tests - we analyse, test and develop innovations that will shape the flying of the future.

What to expect

In the context of our research into distributed avionics platforms, a reliable and performant way of safely connecting to avionics networks inside the aircraft is needed. While the processing systems often have to fulfill hard-real-time constraints, aircraft core networks based on Ethernet work mostly asynchronously. Therefore, much work needs to be offloaded to the hardware to not block up the processing system. Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) that integrate both programmable hardware (FPGAs) and processing systems (CPUs) are a promising target for these applications.

Your tasks

• Your task is to design, implement and evaluate a verifiable software driver for communicating with an FPGA-based Ethernet device using AXI scatter-gather DMA.
• While reference implementations for these drivers in the programming language C exist for Xilinx FPGAs, the goal is to evaluate the feasibility of verifiable programming languages such as Pancake for use in complex device drivers.
• You will perform a suitable evaluation that accesses the performance and correctness of your implementation and compare the results to that of the reference implementation.

Your profile

• You are currently studying for a Bachelor's or Master's degree.
• practical experience with software for embedded systems
• practical experience with FPGA SoCs
• interest in formal methods and software verification
• practical experience with data analysis tools like SciPy, RStudio or similar

We look forward to getting to know you!

If you have any questions about this position (Vacancy-ID 3547) please contact:

Tim Schubert

Tel.: 0531 295-1612