Electronic Systems group at the TU/e
The Electronic Systems (ES) group consists of seven full professors, one associate professor, eight assistant professors, several postdocs, about 30 PDEng and PhD candidates and support staff. The ES group is world-renowned for its design automation and embedded systems research. It is our ambition to provide a scientific basis for design trajectories of electronic systems, ranging from digital circuits to cyber-physical systems. The group is strongly involved in the electrical engineering bachelor and master programs of the TU/e, as well as in the automotive bachelor program and the embedded systems master program. The group has excellent infrastructure that includes individual computers, computer servers, state-of-the-art FPGA and GPU farms, sensor- and ad-hoc networking equipment, a cyber-physical systems lab, an electronics lab and a comprehensive range of electronic-design software. ES has strong collaborations with industry, research institutes and other universities. Eleven of its staff members have a second affiliation besides their TUE-ES affiliation. The ES group has been very successful in attracting funding for its research through national and international projects and collaborations (EU programs: H2020, ITEA, CATRENE, ECSEL, Artemis, Marie Curie; national programs: NWO, RVO, contract research), for a total budget of around 2M euro per year. The ES group is a multicultural team, with staff members of eight different nationalities and students from all over the world.
Are you ready for a two-year training program while at the same time receiving a salary? Do you like to work in the world-famous company Philips, which has an international, multidisciplinary team of professional experts, for the next two years? Would you like to apply your innovative, creative ideas in EU funded project along with 14 other early stage researchers? Then you should consider starting as a PDEng trainee at Eindhoven University of Technology, TU/e,
www.tue.nl, in the Netherlands and gain a head start on your fellow Master students!
Job description Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng)
The PDEng position is part of the international Marie Sk³odowska-Curie training network oCPS - Platform-aware Model-driven Optimization of Cyber-Physical Systems. The project for this traineeship is conducted in collaboration between the Electronic Systems group (
www.es.ele.tue.nl) in the Department of Electrical Engineering at TU/e and Philips Healthcare (
https://www.philips.nl/). You build up a valuable network in the ICT business community and can count on professional supervision from both the university and Philips. Your individual training scheme is customized to your personal and professional skills, as well as the demands of the industrial project.
During the traineeship you follow an individual and network-wide program, consisting of courses, workshops, assessments, and industrial projects, deepening the theoretical knowledge gained during your university studies.
Project description
Philips Medical Systems is one of the major players in the market of X-Ray systems, with the Allura interventional X-Ray (iXR) system as a flagship. The physical appearance of the Allura includes heavy machinery in order to position and move the XR beam; the entire system is under control of software. The engineering of this system is a complex task considering the high demands on safety and security, and its general safety-critical operation in an operation room filled with people.
The algorithms of the Allura are, due to demanding real-time requirements, highly sensitive to the underlying computing architecture. When new, innovative algorithms are applied, the computing footprint requirements of the software may increase. During the lifetime of a machine, which comprises easily two decades, upgrades in both hardware and software are required. The need for increased computing power on the one hand, and the need for backwards compatibility on the other makes a challenging demand on the underlying software architecture.
State-of-the-art
Due to technology improvements, changes in the hardware platform are common, ranging from minor changes in the make and speeds of components to entire changes in technology. The existing software needs to be reliably mapped onto this new hardware without extensive modification. To that end, the dependencies of the software on changes in the hardware platform must be understood. In addition, scenarios of changes must be investigated without actually performing the change in order to assess the suitability, which is not common now.
Novel contributions
This PDEng will develop parameterized models describing hardware dependencies and performance characteristics of software to an extent that performance is predicted sufficiently accurately. This may also lead to guidelines regarding the architecture for heterogeneous technology and application domains. Techniques will be developed to derive the model of a subsystem by studying its behavior at the interface. Using these interaction models, performance can be managed and predicted in view of changes in the execution architecture.