Modeling, analysis, and self-management of electronic textiles

Abstract

Abstract-Scaling in CMOS device technology has made it possible to cheaply embed intelligence in a myriad of devices. In particular, it has become feasible to fabricate flexible materials (e.g., woven fabrics) with large numbers of computing and communication elements embedded into them. Such computational fabrics, electronic textiles, or e-textiles have applications ranging from smart materials for aerospace applications to wearable computing. This paper addresses the modeling of computation, communication and failure in e-textiles and investigates the performance of two techniques, code migration and remote execution, for adapting applications executing over the hardware substrate, to failures in both devices and interconnection links. The investigation is carried out using a cycle-accurate simulation environment developed to model computation, power consumption, and node/link failures for large numbers of computing elements in configurable network topologies. A detailed analysis of the two techniques for adapting applications to the error prone substrate is presented, as well as a study of the effects of parameters, such as failure rates, communication speeds, and topologies, on the efficacy of the techniques and the performance of the system as a whole. It is shown that code migration and remote execution provide feasible methods for adapting applications to take advantage of redundancy in the presence of failures and involve trade offs in communication versus memory requirements in processing elements.

Process Variation Characterization and Modeling of Nanoparticle Interconnects for Foldable Electronics

“…Lu et al [14] have studied polymer composites as gate dielectrics for organic electronic applications. Marbell et al [18] have provided high-level models for system implementation in electronic textiles. Nieuwoudt et al [19] have provided a theoretical process variability analysis on carbon nanotubes.…”

Dynamic fault-tolerance and metrics for battery powered, failure-prone systems

“…In what we term lightweight code migration [12,13], in contrast to traditional process migration [6], applications are implemented in a manner in which they can be asynchronously restarted while maintaining persistence for important state. By placing information that must be persistent across restarts in the initialized and uninitialized data segments of the application, it is possible to maintain state across migration while only transferring the program code, initialized data and uninitialized data segments.…”

“…These efforts have further been bolstered by recent attention to the effect of application profiles on battery lifetimes. Progress in device technologies, coupled with reduction in costs, is enabling new classes of applications, such as sensor networks, and large-area surfaces with embedded computation, sensing and actuation capabilities [13]. Such flexible substrates may contain 100's or 1000's of low power microcontrollers embedded per m 2 , with power distribution and communication fibers, and actuation capabilities in the form of shape-memoryalloys embedded in the substrate [14].…”

Energy-Aware Routing for E-Textile Applications

“…Several architectures with distributed deployment of batteries are proposed in [5]. Adaptive techniques, such as code migration and remote execution, applied to redundantly deployed nodes have also been proposed to increase the operational lifetime of the e-textile applications.…”

“…However, they do not apply to e-textile platforms because of the inherent difference in the cost functions that characterize wireless and wired environments, and because of their high requirement of computational and memory resources. We follow the same general distributed deployment scheme of batteries as in [5], but due to potential link failures, the target architecture in our case is a network instead of a bus-based architecture. Also, unlike [5], fixed and re-programmable devices are supported as computational nodes in our architecture.…”