Abstract:
Dr. Gang Qu will review some of the research activities in the embedded system lab at the University of Maryland College Park. He will focus the discussion on how to build integrated circuits and systems for security and energy efficiency.

First, Dr. Qu will use the finite state machine (FSM) model to demonstrate that the circuits and systems built with today's design flow and tools are vulnerable against simple attacks such as random walk. He will further show that a malicious designer can embed Hardware Trojan Horse into the system to gain unauthorized control of the system. He will then describe a practical circuit level technique to guarantee the trustworthiness of the circuit implementation of a given FSM. Second, he will introduce the concept of physical unclonable function (PUF), a unique feature embedded in the circuits during fabrication process, and describe our recent work on PUF. The last part on trusted circuit is a brief introduction of several projects on hardware-software co-design to build security and trust.

In the second half of the talk, Dr. Qu will describe the advances of low power circuit and system design with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). After a brief introduction of DVFS, he will present some theoretical results on the energy saving potential by DVFS and a practical solution to build DVFS with multiple operating voltages. He will then show several techniques to perform DVFS in the non-traditional situation when there is no timing slack to slow down the execution. We will conclude the talk with our latest results on DVFS with the awareness of leakage, on-chip temperature, fabrication variation, and the availability of multiple cores on the chip.

About the Presenter:
Dr. Gang Qu is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the co-director of the embedded system research lab and the wireless sensor lab. His current research interests are on VLSI design automation and wireless sensor networks, with special focus on security and energy efficiency. He has published more than 100 journal articles and conference papers in these fields with best paper awards in MobiCom (2001) and ASAP (2006). Dr. Qu is currently on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters and Integration, the VLSI Journal.