Institute for Complex Systems

Welcome to the Institute for Complex Systems

The Institute for Complex Systems (ICS) targets the ever-increasing complexity of hardware/software systems. Here, the institute considers suitable abstraction levels, i.e. Virtual Prototypes (VPs) in SystemC for HW/SW systems at the Electronic System Level (ESL), HW designs in Verilog/VHDL at the Register Transfer Level (RTL), down to the gate-level. Primary research areas are verification, debugging, and synthesis, all major problems in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). We heavily use the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) in our research work (see e.g. our open-source RISC-V VP++).

Announcements

  • We are looking for Student Assistants. If you are interested, please contact Prof. Daniel Große.

News

2024

  • Nov 30, 2024: Our paper “Using Virtual Prototypes and Metamorphic Testing to Verify the Hardware/Software-Stack of Embedded Graphics Libraries” has been accepted for publication in the journal Integration, the VLSI journal (Integr.).
  • Nov 15, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Research Chair of the Design and Verification Conference in Europe (DVCon Europe) 2025.
  • Oct 29, 2024: Our work on Single instruction isolation for RISC-V vector test failures is presented at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) 2024.
  • Oct 15, 2024: Daniel Große and Lucas Klemmer give the tutorial “Unleash the Full Potential of Your Waveforms: From Extra-functional Analysis to Functional Debug via Programs on Waveforms” at the Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition Europe (DVCon) 2024.
  • Oct 04, 2024: Oliver Trost successfully completed his Bachelor thesis entitled “RISC-V Multi-Cycle Processor Implementation in VHDL”. Congratulations!
  • Sep 04-06, 2024: Our work on An extensible and flexible methodology for analyzing the cache performance of hardware designs is presented at the Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL) 2024. Moreover, Lucas Klemmer presents his work on “Versatile Hardware Analysis Techniques - From Waveform-based Analysis to Formal Verification” at the FDL PhD Forum.
  • Aug 29, 2024: Fabian Bleck, Alexander Pichler and Rene Wimmer successfully completed their Bachelor thesis entitled “Static Polymorphism in Spade using Traits”. Congratulations!
  • Aug 29, 2024: Frans Skarman from Linköping University, Sweden, visits us and gives an invited talk on “Spade and Surfer - An HDL inspired by software languages and a modern waveform viewer”.
  • Jul 13, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 2025.
  • Jun 25-27, 2024: Our works on (i) Surfer: a waveform viewer as dynamic as RISC-V and (ii) Bounded load/stores in grammar-based code generation for testing the RISC-V vector extension are presented at the RISC-V Summit Europe 2024.
  • Jun 24, 2024: Lucas Klemmer received the Young Researchers Award by Johannes Kepler Universität Linz for his research on the Waveform Analysis Language (WAL) developed during his PhD — Congratulations!
  • Jun 13, 2024: Lucas Klemmer successfully defends his PhD thesis titled “Versatile Hardware Analysis Techniques: From Waveform-based Analysis to Formal Verification” — Congratulations! Many thanks to the examination committee consisting of Prof. Daniel Große (JKU), Prof. Wolfgang Kunz (RPTU), Prof. Martina Seidl (JKU) and headed by Prof. Josef Küng (JKU).
  • Jun 06, 2024: Daniel Große gives a keynote on “Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Your Waveforms via Programmable Analysis” at the Microelectronic Systems Symposium (MESS) 2024.
  • Jun 03, 2024: Our book Erweiterte virtuelle Prototypen für heterogene Systeme has been published by Springer.
  • May 23, 2024: Our work on Relation coverage: A new paradigm for hardware/software testing is presented at the European Test Symposium (ETS) 2024.
  • May 14, 2024: Paul Blume successfully completed his Bachelor thesis entitled “First SERV: Towards Device Localization using BLE”. Congratulations!
  • Apr 30, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) 2024.
  • Apr 14, 2024: Our paper “Divider verification using symbolic computer algebra and delayed don’t care optimization: theory and practical implementation” has been accepted for publication in the journal Formal Methods in System Design. See PDF (open access).
  • Apr 12, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the International Workshop on Metamorphic Testing (MET) 2024.
  • Apr 11, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Topic Co-Chair for “Validation, Verification, Debug and Diagnosis” at the European Test Symposium (ETS) 2025.
  • Apr 05, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the Design and Verification Conference in Europe (DVCon Europe) 2024 in the research track.
  • Mar 25-27, 2024: Our works on (i) A RISC-V “V” VP: Unlocking vector processing for evaluation at the system level and (ii) Using formal verification methods for optimization of circuits under external constraints are presented at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 2024. Moreover, our works (i) RISC-V VP++: Next generation open-source virtual prototype and (ii) WSVA: A SystemVerilog Assertion to WAL Compiler are presented at the Workshop on Open-Source Design Automation (OSDA) 2024 hosted at DATE. Finally, Lucas Klemmer presents his work on “Versatile Hardware Analysis Techniques - From Waveform-based Analysis to Formal Verification” at the DATE PhD Forum.
  • Mar 16, 2024: Our paper “WAVING Goodbye to Manual Waveform Analysis in HDL Design with WAL” has been accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD). See PDF (open access).
  • Mar 12, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the special session “MATTERV: Opensource Methods, architectures, tools and technologies for RISC-V” at the Euromicro Conference Series on Digital System Design (DSD) 2024.
  • Mar 05, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the International Workshop on Boolean Problems (IWSBP) 2024.
  • Feb 14, 2024: Our work on Leveraging Virtual Prototypes and Metamorphic Testing for Verification of Embedded Graphics Libraries is presented at the ITG/GI/GMM-Workshop Methoden und Beschreibungssprachen zur Modellierung und Verifikation von Schaltungen und Systemen (MBMV) 2024.
  • Jan 30, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL) 2024.
  • Jan 23-25, 2024: Our works on (i) Verifying embedded graphics libraries leveraging virtual prototypes and metamorphic testing and (ii) Towards a highly interactive design-debug-verification cycle are presented at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) 2024.
  • Jan 16, 2024: Daniel Große has been appointed as Program Committee Member of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Design Automation (OSDA) 2024.

2023