PhD / PostDoc (m/f/d) position "Intelligent Wrapper for Automotive based Main Memory Controllers"

15.04.2024, Wissenschaftliches Personal

The Chair of Integrated Systems at TU Munich is offering a PhD / PostDoc position on the topic of Intelligent Wrapper for Automotive based Main Memory Controllers.

The Chair of Integrated Systems at Technical University of Munich (TUM) is working on multi- and many-core processor architectures in application domains like IP network processing, visual computing, automotive electronics and approximate computing. Solutions shall be optimized for various, often divergent objectives, e.g. power efficiency, high performance and fault tolerance. We apply a platform-based design approach by reusing already existing design components (IP cores) and complementing the architecture by specific extensions for the intended optimizations.

In the automotive domain, the steady increase of functional diversity and complexity in today’s and future cars, especially for autonomous driving, require an appropriate upscaling of the vehicular compute infrastructure. A hierarchy consisting of near-sensor controllers, zonal gateways up to central car servers, interconnected by a Gbit/s in-vehicle network with service guarantees, altogether providing supercomputing capabilities, are expected to form the IT backbone of future cars.

Within the BMBF Project Mannheim-CeCaS we are investigating intelligent extensions to standard main memory controllers which, by anticipating read/write access patterns to data structures from past observations and application-specific knowledge, pre-load data from main memory into a fast on-chip SRAM buffer. Reversely, modified data that is presumable not used any more, is written back into main memory to free SRAM space. The overall goal is to serve the memory transactions from the processor cores mainly from the SRAM buffer and thus hide the access latencies of slow main memory. As a special variant, we also will consider non-volatile memory (NVM) with its still higher latencies as an increasingly important technology in the automotive domain when short boot-up times and immediate availability of data are required.

We do the mentioned investigations in tight cooperation with industry partners and in coordination with the TUM Chair of Security in Information Technology who are providing extensions that protect the validity and privacy of the information stored in main memory, especially NVM. Our common goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed concepts via FPGA-based prototyping.

We are looking for one full-time scientific staff member for an initial duration of 2 years with the option of prolongation. The position is available right now. Employment is according to the TV-L wage agreement group E13. Condition for employment is a Master or a PhD in electrical or computer engineering. Previous knowledge in several of the following areas is required:

• Heterogeneous multicore processing systems,
• Memory hierarchies and technologies (static, dynamic, NVM),
• System simulation using e.g. SystemC,
• HDL-based digital circuit and system design,
• Xilinx FPGA prototyping platforms and the associated design flow / tools.

Qualified applicants are invited to send their application documents (CV, certificates and any other relevant papers) by not later than 02.06.2024 to:

Prof. Dr. Andreas Herkersdorf
Technical University of Munich
Chair of Integrated Systems
Arcisstr. 21
80333 Munich

Email: lis@ei.tum.de

Application documents sent via postal service will not be returned but destroyed in compliance with privacy protection rules.

The position is suitable for people with disabilities. Disabled applicants will be given priority if they have the same qualifications and professional performance. TUM aims to increase the proportion of women in its workforce and expressly welcomes applications from qualified women.

As part of your application, you provide personal data to the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Please view our privacy policy on collecting and processing personal data in the course of the application process pursuant to Art.13 of the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union (GDPR) at https://portal.mytum.de/kompass/datenschutz/Bewerbung/#English. By submitting your application, you confirm to have read and understood the data protection information provided by TUM.

Kontakt: Thomas Wild, thomas.wild@tum.de