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

German Aerospace Center (DLR) Braunschweig

Stellenbeschreibung:

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.

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

Design, implement and evaluate a verifiable software driver for communicating with an FPGA‑based Ethernet device using AXI scatter‑gather DMA.
Evaluate the feasibility of verifiable programming languages such as Pancake for use in complex device drivers, compared to reference implementations in C for Xilinx FPGAs.
Perform a suitable evaluation that accesses the performance and correctness of your implementation and compare the results to that of the reference implementation.