Embedded systems are used everywhere - starting from simple everyday appliances to complex multimedia and biomedical equipments. The complexity of such systems is increasing at an exponential rate due to both advances in technology and demand for realization of ever more complex applications in the areas of communication, multimedia, networking and entertainment. System designers and software developers need to ensure that the final product meets a wide variety of design constraints including cost, power, energy, performance, safety, security, reliability, and so on. For example, energy conservation is a key requirement for battery-operated devices to improve battery life without compromising performance. To enable mass usage, the cost of these systems needs to be reasonable. Similarly, safety, security and reliability are also extremely important to ensure that these systems are not harmful to users and provides consistent high-quality service while ensuring that all communications are authentic and confidential. While these systems represent a diverse application domains, they share a common theme - each system is designed to perform a specific set of functions. This application-specific nature of embedded systems creates unique challenges and associated optimization opportunities. Moreover, increasing design complexity coupled with short time-to-market create a critical need for developing automated techniques for design and verification of embedded systems.

The primary focus of Embedded Systems Lab is to develop efficient tools, techniques and methodologies for developing energy-efficient and secure embedded systems. Currently, we are investigating many exciting and cutting-edge research problems including system security and privacy, network-on-chip architecture, energy-aware computing, machine learning, formal verification, self-healing systems, hardware security and trust, and post-silicon validation and debug. These research projects are sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), US Department of Education (ED), Army Research Office (ARO), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Edaptive, Cisco, Raytheon, Harris, IBM, and Intel. This has resulted in seven books, twenty-five book chapters, eight Ph.D. dissertaions, five MS theses, more than 150 journal and conference publications, and many prestigious awards. Please visit the above links for further details on researchers, ongoing research projects, and publications.