ECE 586 CH

Lectures and discussions related to advanced topics and new areas of interest in decision and control theory, including hybrid, sampled-data, and fault tolerant systems, control over networks, vision-based control, system estimation and identification, and dynamic games. Course Information: May be repeated up to 12 hours within a semester, and up to 20 hours total for the course. Students may not receive additional credit towards a degree from multiple offerings of this course if those offerings have significant overlap, as determined by the ECE department. Prerequisite: As specified each semester of consent of instructor. It is expected that each offering will have a 500-level course as prerequisite or co-requisite.

Topic: Coding Approaches to Reliable System Design. Prerequisites: ECE413 or ECE462 (or permission of instructor). Familiarity with elementary algebra at the level of Math 417 and linear system theory at the level of ECE515 would be helpful, but not required; a self-contained introduction to these topics will be provided.

This course describes systematic and integrated approaches towards the design and implementation of fault-tolerant combinational circuits and dynamic systems. Building on results from recent research, the course blends together techniques from coding and complexity theory, digital design, and control, automata and system theory. The course initially studies fault-tolerant combinational architectures under a unifying approach that exposes the similarities between coding for reliable communication and coding for reliable computation. This approach is subsequently extended to handle fault tolerance in systems whose internal state influences their future behavior, such as finite-state controllers or algorithmic computations evolving over several time steps. The introduction of time and state dynamics presents new challenges for engineering design, but also offers new degrees of freedom and opens up exciting possibilities for future digital system implementation. The course discusses some of these open research questions for a number of systems of special-interest, such as finite-state machines, digital signal processing filters, cellular automata and discrete event systems. An introduction to the basic objectives and techniques in coding and in design for fault diagnosis and fault tolerance is provided.

2/13/2013