With the rapid development of the semiconductor industry, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools have become essential for chip design and verification. By deploying EDA tools on a cloud platform, we can achieve flexible scaling of computing resources, enhanced simulation efficiency, and improved accessibility for users. This project aims to develop several EDA tools including a CAD tool for chiplet design that supports automatic routing and routing performance evaluation. This project can be conducted as a BacheIor's Thesis/ Master's Thesis/ Research Internship (Forschungspraxis)/ Student Assistant Job. A detailed topic can be customized for you based on your interests and technical skills.

Prerequisites

With the rapid development of the semiconductor industry, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools have become essential for chip design and verification. By deploying EDA tools on a cloud platform, we can achieve flexible scaling of computing resources, enhanced simulation efficiency, and improved accessibility for users. This project aims to develop several EDA tools including a CAD tool for chiplet design that supports automatic routing and routing performance evaluation. This project can be conducted as a BacheIor's Thesis/ Master's Thesis/ Research Internship (Forschungspraxis)/ Student Assistant Job. A detailed topic can be customized for you based on your interests and technical skills.

Prerequisites

Motivation

HW/SW Codesign, a technique that has been around for several decades, allows hardware designers
to take the target application into consideration and further enables software engineers to start
developing and testing firmware before actual hardware becomes available. This can drastically
reduce the time-to-market for new products and also comes with lower error rates compared to
conventional development cycles. Virtual prototyping is an important component in the typical
HW/SW-Codesign flow as software can be simulated at several abstraction layers (RTL-Level,
Instruction Level, Functional-Level) at early development stages, not only to find potential
hardware/software bugs but also to gain importation information regarding the expected
performance and efficiency metrics such as Runtime/Latency/Utilization.
Due to the increasing relevance of machine learning applications in our everyday lives, the co-
design and co-optimization on the hardware and models (HW/Model-Codesign) became more
popular, hence instead of the C/C++ code to be executed on the target device, the model
architecture and training aspects are aligned with the to be designed hardware or vice-versa.
However, due to the high complexity of nowadays machine learning frameworks and software
compilers, the deployment-related parameters also play a bigger role, which should be investigated
and exploited in the thesis.

Technical Background
The Embedded System Level (ESL) group at the EDA chair has a deep background in virtual
prototyping techniques. Recently, embedded machine learning became a highly exciting field of
research.
We are working primarily in an open-source software ecosystem. ETISS[1] is the instruction set
simulator that allows us to evaluate various embedded applications for different ISAs (nowadays
mainly RISC-V). Apache TVM[2] has been our ML deployment framework of choice for several
years now, especially due to its MicroTVM subproject. Our TinyML deployment and benchmarking
framework MLonMCU[3] is a powerful tool that enables us to evaluate different configurations of
tools fully automatically. However the actual candidates for evaluation need to be chosen manually,
which can lead to suboptimal results.

Task Description
In this project, an automated exploration for deployment parameters should be established. Further,
state-of-the-art optimization techniques must be utilized to find optimal sets of parameters in the
hyper-dimensional search space in an acceptable amount of time (no exhaustive search feasible).
The optimization should take multiple deployment metrics (for example, total runtime or memory
footprint) into account, yielding to a multi-objective optimization flow.
The to-be-implemented algorithms should build up on the existing tooling for prototyping and
benchmarking TinyML models developed at the EDA chair (ETISS & MLonMCU). If available,
existing libraries/packages for (hyper-parameter) optimization (for example, Optuna[4] or
XGBoost[5]) can be utilized.

First, a customizable objective function is required, which can be calculated, for example, based on
the weighted sum of relevant metrics determined using MLonMCU and should be later integrated
into the optimization algorithms.
To keep the complexity of the task low, the considered hardware and machine learning models can
be assumed as fixed. The workloads are further provided as already trained (and compressed)
models. The focus will thereby be solely on the deployment aspects of the machine learning
applications, which are mostly defined by the used machine learning and software compilers. The
search space grows in size heavily depending on the number of considered free variables, which can
be of different types (for example, categorical, discrete, sequential,…). Some examples are:
- Used data/kernel layout for convolution operations (NCHW, NHWC, HWIO, OHWI,…)
- Choice of kernel implementation (trivial, fallback, tuned, 3rd party kernel library, external,
accelerator,…)
- Compiler Flags (-O3/-Os/…, -fno-unroll,…)
It might turn out that some decisions might be helpful for some layers, while others would profit
from slightly or heavily different sets of parameters. Therefore, it should be possible to perform the
exploration on a per-layer fashion, which could yield even better results.
The optimization and exploration flow shall be visualized (for example Pareto plots) for the user
and executed in an efficient way to make sure of the available resources on our compute servers
(utilizing parallel processing and remote-execution features provided by MLonMCU)

Work Outline
1. Literature research
2. Setup toolset (MLonMCU → ETISS + TVM + muRISCV-NN)
3. Describe customizable objective/score functions for the optimization algorithm
4. Define search space(s) for deployment-parameter exploration
5. Develop automated exploration and optimization flow around the MLonMCU tool which
can take a batch of parameters and return the metrics used as inputs of the objective function
6. Investigate the potential of fine-grained (per-layer) optimization compared to a holistic (end-
to-end) approach
7. Optional: Introduce constraints (for example ROM footprint <1MB) to remove illegal
candidates from the search space (and potentially skip the time-consuming execution of
candidates)
8. Optional: Allow fast-estimation of deployment metrics by training a cost-model based on
the previous experiments.

References
[1] Mueller-Gritschneder, D., Devarajegowda, K., Dittrich, M., Ecker, W., Greim, M., & Schlichtmann, U. (2017, October). The
extendable translating instruction set simulator (ETISS) interlinked with an MDA framework for fast RISC prototyping. In
Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping: Shortening the Path from Specification to Prototype
(pp. 79-84). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/etiss
[2] Chen, T., Moreau, T., Jiang, Z., Shen, H., Yan, E. Q., Wang, L., ... & Krishnamurthy, A. (2018). TVM: end-to-end optimization
stack for deep learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04799, 11(2018), 20. GitHub: https://github.com/apache/tvm
[3] van Kempen, P., Stahl, R., Mueller-Gritschneder, D., & Schlichtmann, U. (2023, September). MLonMCU: TinyML
Benchmarking with Fast Retargeting. In Proceedings of the 2023 Workshop on Compilers, Deployment, and Tooling for Edge AI (pp.
32-36). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/mlonmcu
[4] Akiba, T., Sano, S., Yanase, T., Ohta, T., & Koyama, M. (2019, July). Optuna: A next-generation hyperparameter optimization
framework. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery & data mining (pp. 2623-
2631). GitHub: https://github.com/optuna/optuna
[5] Chen, T., & Guestrin, C. (2016, August). Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of the 22nd acm sigkdd
international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 785-794). GitHub: https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost

Motivation

HW/SW Codesign, a technique that has been around for several decades, allows hardware designers
to take the target application into consideration and further enables software engineers to start
developing and testing firmware before actual hardware becomes available. This can drastically
reduce the time-to-market for new products and also comes with lower error rates compared to
conventional development cycles. Virtual prototyping is an important component in the typical
HW/SW-Codesign flow as software can be simulated at several abstraction layers (RTL-Level,
Instruction Level, Functional-Level) at early development stages, not only to find potential
hardware/software bugs but also to gain importation information regarding the expected
performance and efficiency metrics such as Runtime/Latency/Utilization.
Due to the increasing relevance of machine learning applications in our everyday lives, the co-
design and co-optimization on the hardware and models (HW/Model-Codesign) became more
popular, hence instead of the C/C++ code to be executed on the target device, the model
architecture and training aspects are aligned with the to be designed hardware or vice-versa.
However, due to the high complexity of nowadays machine learning frameworks and software
compilers, the deployment-related parameters also play a bigger role, which should be investigated
and exploited in the thesis.

Technical Background
The Embedded System Level (ESL) group at the EDA chair has a deep background in virtual
prototyping techniques. Recently, embedded machine learning became a highly exciting field of
research.
We are working primarily in an open-source software ecosystem. ETISS[1] is the instruction set
simulator that allows us to evaluate various embedded applications for different ISAs (nowadays
mainly RISC-V). Apache TVM[2] has been our ML deployment framework of choice for several
years now, especially due to its MicroTVM subproject. Our TinyML deployment and benchmarking
framework MLonMCU[3] is a powerful tool that enables us to evaluate different configurations of
tools fully automatically. However the actual candidates for evaluation need to be chosen manually,
which can lead to suboptimal results.

Task Description
In this project, an automated exploration for deployment parameters should be established. Further,
state-of-the-art optimization techniques must be utilized to find optimal sets of parameters in the
hyper-dimensional search space in an acceptable amount of time (no exhaustive search feasible).
The optimization should take multiple deployment metrics (for example, total runtime or memory
footprint) into account, yielding to a multi-objective optimization flow.
The to-be-implemented algorithms should build up on the existing tooling for prototyping and
benchmarking TinyML models developed at the EDA chair (ETISS & MLonMCU). If available,
existing libraries/packages for (hyper-parameter) optimization (for example, Optuna[4] or
XGBoost[5]) can be utilized.

First, a customizable objective function is required, which can be calculated, for example, based on
the weighted sum of relevant metrics determined using MLonMCU and should be later integrated
into the optimization algorithms.
To keep the complexity of the task low, the considered hardware and machine learning models can
be assumed as fixed. The workloads are further provided as already trained (and compressed)
models. The focus will thereby be solely on the deployment aspects of the machine learning
applications, which are mostly defined by the used machine learning and software compilers. The
search space grows in size heavily depending on the number of considered free variables, which can
be of different types (for example, categorical, discrete, sequential,…). Some examples are:
- Used data/kernel layout for convolution operations (NCHW, NHWC, HWIO, OHWI,…)
- Choice of kernel implementation (trivial, fallback, tuned, 3rd party kernel library, external,
accelerator,…)
- Compiler Flags (-O3/-Os/…, -fno-unroll,…)
It might turn out that some decisions might be helpful for some layers, while others would profit
from slightly or heavily different sets of parameters. Therefore, it should be possible to perform the
exploration on a per-layer fashion, which could yield even better results.
The optimization and exploration flow shall be visualized (for example Pareto plots) for the user
and executed in an efficient way to make sure of the available resources on our compute servers
(utilizing parallel processing and remote-execution features provided by MLonMCU)

Work Outline
1. Literature research
2. Setup toolset (MLonMCU → ETISS + TVM + muRISCV-NN)
3. Describe customizable objective/score functions for the optimization algorithm
4. Define search space(s) for deployment-parameter exploration
5. Develop automated exploration and optimization flow around the MLonMCU tool which
can take a batch of parameters and return the metrics used as inputs of the objective function
6. Investigate the potential of fine-grained (per-layer) optimization compared to a holistic (end-
to-end) approach
7. Optional: Introduce constraints (for example ROM footprint <1MB) to remove illegal
candidates from the search space (and potentially skip the time-consuming execution of
candidates)
8. Optional: Allow fast-estimation of deployment metrics by training a cost-model based on
the previous experiments.

References
[1] Mueller-Gritschneder, D., Devarajegowda, K., Dittrich, M., Ecker, W., Greim, M., & Schlichtmann, U. (2017, October). The
extendable translating instruction set simulator (ETISS) interlinked with an MDA framework for fast RISC prototyping. In
Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping: Shortening the Path from Specification to Prototype
(pp. 79-84). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/etiss
[2] Chen, T., Moreau, T., Jiang, Z., Shen, H., Yan, E. Q., Wang, L., ... & Krishnamurthy, A. (2018). TVM: end-to-end optimization
stack for deep learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04799, 11(2018), 20. GitHub: https://github.com/apache/tvm
[3] van Kempen, P., Stahl, R., Mueller-Gritschneder, D., & Schlichtmann, U. (2023, September). MLonMCU: TinyML
Benchmarking with Fast Retargeting. In Proceedings of the 2023 Workshop on Compilers, Deployment, and Tooling for Edge AI (pp.
32-36). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/mlonmcu
[4] Akiba, T., Sano, S., Yanase, T., Ohta, T., & Koyama, M. (2019, July). Optuna: A next-generation hyperparameter optimization
framework. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery & data mining (pp. 2623-
2631). GitHub: https://github.com/optuna/optuna
[5] Chen, T., & Guestrin, C. (2016, August). Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of the 22nd acm sigkdd
international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 785-794). GitHub: https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost

Welcome to "Startup Microsystems: Innovate, Create, Compete – COSIMA Challenge," a dynamic and hands-on internship designed to empower students in harnessing their creativity and technical skills to participate in the COSIMA (Competition of Students in Microsystems Applications) contest. This internship is not just an academic pursuit; it's a journey towards becoming innovative entrepreneurs in the realm of sensor and microsystem applications.

COSIMA is a German national student competition. 

Overview:

In this practical internship, students will delve into the world of microsystems, exploring their components, functionalities, and potential applications. The focus will be on fostering creativity and teamwork as students work collaboratively to conceive, design, and prototype innovative solutions using sensors and microsystems.

Key Features:

Creative Exploration: Unlike traditional courses and internships, this one offers the freedom to choose and define your own technical challenge. Students will be encouraged to think outside the box, identify real-world problems, and propose solutions that leverage microsystems to enhance human-technology interactions.

Hands-On Prototyping: The heart of the internship lies in turning ideas into reality. Students will actively engage in the prototyping process, developing functional prototypes of their innovative concepts. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the practical aspects of sensor integration, actuation, and control electronics.

COSIMA Contest Preparation: The internship will align with the COSIMA competition requirements, preparing students to present their prototypes on the competition day. Guidance will be provided on creating impactful presentations that showcase the ingenuity and practicality of their solutions.

Go International: The winners of COSIMA will qualify to take part in the international iCAN competition. Guidance and preparation for the iCAN will be provided.

Entrepreneurial Mindset: Drawing inspiration from successful startups that emerged from COSIMA, the internship will instill an entrepreneurial mindset. Students will learn about the essentials of founding a startup, from business planning to pitching their ideas.

Us in the past:

Das war COSIMA 2024 (cosima-mems.de)

iCANX Wettbewerb 2024 (cosima-mems.de)

Das war COSIMA 2023 (cosima-mems.de)

iCAN Wettbewerb 2023 (cosima-mems.de)

Sieger COSIMA 2022 (cosima-mems.de)

Prerequisites

With the rapid development of the semiconductor industry, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools have become essential for chip design and verification. By deploying EDA tools on a cloud platform, we can achieve flexible scaling of computing resources, enhanced simulation efficiency, and improved accessibility for users. This project aims to develop several EDA tools including a CAD tool for chiplet design that supports automatic routing and routing performance evaluation. This project can be conducted as a BacheIor's Thesis/ Master's Thesis/ Research Internship (Forschungspraxis)/ Student Assistant Job. A detailed topic can be customized for you based on your interests and technical skills.

Prerequisites

Motivation

HW/SW Codesign, a technique that has been around for several decades, allows hardware designers
to take the target application into consideration and further enables software engineers to start
developing and testing firmware before actual hardware becomes available. This can drastically
reduce the time-to-market for new products and also comes with lower error rates compared to
conventional development cycles. Virtual prototyping is an important component in the typical
HW/SW-Codesign flow as software can be simulated at several abstraction layers (RTL-Level,
Instruction Level, Functional-Level) at early development stages, not only to find potential
hardware/software bugs but also to gain importation information regarding the expected
performance and efficiency metrics such as Runtime/Latency/Utilization.
Due to the increasing relevance of machine learning applications in our everyday lives, the co-
design and co-optimization on the hardware and models (HW/Model-Codesign) became more
popular, hence instead of the C/C++ code to be executed on the target device, the model
architecture and training aspects are aligned with the to be designed hardware or vice-versa.
However, due to the high complexity of nowadays machine learning frameworks and software
compilers, the deployment-related parameters also play a bigger role, which should be investigated
and exploited in the thesis.

Technical Background
The Embedded System Level (ESL) group at the EDA chair has a deep background in virtual
prototyping techniques. Recently, embedded machine learning became a highly exciting field of
research.
We are working primarily in an open-source software ecosystem. ETISS[1] is the instruction set
simulator that allows us to evaluate various embedded applications for different ISAs (nowadays
mainly RISC-V). Apache TVM[2] has been our ML deployment framework of choice for several
years now, especially due to its MicroTVM subproject. Our TinyML deployment and benchmarking
framework MLonMCU[3] is a powerful tool that enables us to evaluate different configurations of
tools fully automatically. However the actual candidates for evaluation need to be chosen manually,
which can lead to suboptimal results.

Task Description
In this project, an automated exploration for deployment parameters should be established. Further,
state-of-the-art optimization techniques must be utilized to find optimal sets of parameters in the
hyper-dimensional search space in an acceptable amount of time (no exhaustive search feasible).
The optimization should take multiple deployment metrics (for example, total runtime or memory
footprint) into account, yielding to a multi-objective optimization flow.
The to-be-implemented algorithms should build up on the existing tooling for prototyping and
benchmarking TinyML models developed at the EDA chair (ETISS & MLonMCU). If available,
existing libraries/packages for (hyper-parameter) optimization (for example, Optuna[4] or
XGBoost[5]) can be utilized.

First, a customizable objective function is required, which can be calculated, for example, based on
the weighted sum of relevant metrics determined using MLonMCU and should be later integrated
into the optimization algorithms.
To keep the complexity of the task low, the considered hardware and machine learning models can
be assumed as fixed. The workloads are further provided as already trained (and compressed)
models. The focus will thereby be solely on the deployment aspects of the machine learning
applications, which are mostly defined by the used machine learning and software compilers. The
search space grows in size heavily depending on the number of considered free variables, which can
be of different types (for example, categorical, discrete, sequential,…). Some examples are:
- Used data/kernel layout for convolution operations (NCHW, NHWC, HWIO, OHWI,…)
- Choice of kernel implementation (trivial, fallback, tuned, 3rd party kernel library, external,
accelerator,…)
- Compiler Flags (-O3/-Os/…, -fno-unroll,…)
It might turn out that some decisions might be helpful for some layers, while others would profit
from slightly or heavily different sets of parameters. Therefore, it should be possible to perform the
exploration on a per-layer fashion, which could yield even better results.
The optimization and exploration flow shall be visualized (for example Pareto plots) for the user
and executed in an efficient way to make sure of the available resources on our compute servers
(utilizing parallel processing and remote-execution features provided by MLonMCU)

Work Outline
1. Literature research
2. Setup toolset (MLonMCU → ETISS + TVM + muRISCV-NN)
3. Describe customizable objective/score functions for the optimization algorithm
4. Define search space(s) for deployment-parameter exploration
5. Develop automated exploration and optimization flow around the MLonMCU tool which
can take a batch of parameters and return the metrics used as inputs of the objective function
6. Investigate the potential of fine-grained (per-layer) optimization compared to a holistic (end-
to-end) approach
7. Optional: Introduce constraints (for example ROM footprint <1MB) to remove illegal
candidates from the search space (and potentially skip the time-consuming execution of
candidates)
8. Optional: Allow fast-estimation of deployment metrics by training a cost-model based on
the previous experiments.

References
[1] Mueller-Gritschneder, D., Devarajegowda, K., Dittrich, M., Ecker, W., Greim, M., & Schlichtmann, U. (2017, October). The
extendable translating instruction set simulator (ETISS) interlinked with an MDA framework for fast RISC prototyping. In
Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping: Shortening the Path from Specification to Prototype
(pp. 79-84). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/etiss
[2] Chen, T., Moreau, T., Jiang, Z., Shen, H., Yan, E. Q., Wang, L., ... & Krishnamurthy, A. (2018). TVM: end-to-end optimization
stack for deep learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04799, 11(2018), 20. GitHub: https://github.com/apache/tvm
[3] van Kempen, P., Stahl, R., Mueller-Gritschneder, D., & Schlichtmann, U. (2023, September). MLonMCU: TinyML
Benchmarking with Fast Retargeting. In Proceedings of the 2023 Workshop on Compilers, Deployment, and Tooling for Edge AI (pp.
32-36). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/mlonmcu
[4] Akiba, T., Sano, S., Yanase, T., Ohta, T., & Koyama, M. (2019, July). Optuna: A next-generation hyperparameter optimization
framework. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery & data mining (pp. 2623-
2631). GitHub: https://github.com/optuna/optuna
[5] Chen, T., & Guestrin, C. (2016, August). Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of the 22nd acm sigkdd
international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 785-794). GitHub: https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost

Welcome to "Startup Microsystems: Innovate, Create, Compete – COSIMA Challenge," a dynamic and hands-on internship designed to empower students in harnessing their creativity and technical skills to participate in the COSIMA (Competition of Students in Microsystems Applications) contest. This internship is not just an academic pursuit; it's a journey towards becoming innovative entrepreneurs in the realm of sensor and microsystem applications.

COSIMA is a German national student competition. 

Overview:

In this practical internship, students will delve into the world of microsystems, exploring their components, functionalities, and potential applications. The focus will be on fostering creativity and teamwork as students work collaboratively to conceive, design, and prototype innovative solutions using sensors and microsystems.

Key Features:

Creative Exploration: Unlike traditional courses and internships, this one offers the freedom to choose and define your own technical challenge. Students will be encouraged to think outside the box, identify real-world problems, and propose solutions that leverage microsystems to enhance human-technology interactions.

Hands-On Prototyping: The heart of the internship lies in turning ideas into reality. Students will actively engage in the prototyping process, developing functional prototypes of their innovative concepts. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the practical aspects of sensor integration, actuation, and control electronics.

COSIMA Contest Preparation: The internship will align with the COSIMA competition requirements, preparing students to present their prototypes on the competition day. Guidance will be provided on creating impactful presentations that showcase the ingenuity and practicality of their solutions.

Go International: The winners of COSIMA will qualify to take part in the international iCAN competition. Guidance and preparation for the iCAN will be provided.

Entrepreneurial Mindset: Drawing inspiration from successful startups that emerged from COSIMA, the internship will instill an entrepreneurial mindset. Students will learn about the essentials of founding a startup, from business planning to pitching their ideas.

Us in the past:

Das war COSIMA 2024 (cosima-mems.de)

iCANX Wettbewerb 2024 (cosima-mems.de)

Das war COSIMA 2023 (cosima-mems.de)

iCAN Wettbewerb 2023 (cosima-mems.de)

Sieger COSIMA 2022 (cosima-mems.de)

Prerequisites

Welcome to "Startup Microsystems: Innovate, Create, Compete – COSIMA Challenge," a dynamic and hands-on internship designed to empower students in harnessing their creativity and technical skills to participate in the COSIMA (Competition of Students in Microsystems Applications) contest. This internship is not just an academic pursuit; it's a journey towards becoming innovative entrepreneurs in the realm of sensor and microsystem applications.

COSIMA is a German national student competition. 

Overview:

In this practical internship, students will delve into the world of microsystems, exploring their components, functionalities, and potential applications. The focus will be on fostering creativity and teamwork as students work collaboratively to conceive, design, and prototype innovative solutions using sensors and microsystems.

Key Features:

Creative Exploration: Unlike traditional courses and internships, this one offers the freedom to choose and define your own technical challenge. Students will be encouraged to think outside the box, identify real-world problems, and propose solutions that leverage microsystems to enhance human-technology interactions.

Hands-On Prototyping: The heart of the internship lies in turning ideas into reality. Students will actively engage in the prototyping process, developing functional prototypes of their innovative concepts. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the practical aspects of sensor integration, actuation, and control electronics.

COSIMA Contest Preparation: The internship will align with the COSIMA competition requirements, preparing students to present their prototypes on the competition day. Guidance will be provided on creating impactful presentations that showcase the ingenuity and practicality of their solutions.

Go International: The winners of COSIMA will qualify to take part in the international iCAN competition. Guidance and preparation for the iCAN will be provided.

Entrepreneurial Mindset: Drawing inspiration from successful startups that emerged from COSIMA, the internship will instill an entrepreneurial mindset. Students will learn about the essentials of founding a startup, from business planning to pitching their ideas.

Us in the past:

Das war COSIMA 2024 (cosima-mems.de)

iCANX Wettbewerb 2024 (cosima-mems.de)

Das war COSIMA 2023 (cosima-mems.de)

iCAN Wettbewerb 2023 (cosima-mems.de)

Sieger COSIMA 2022 (cosima-mems.de)

Prerequisites

With the rapid development of the semiconductor industry, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools have become essential for chip design and verification. By deploying EDA tools on a cloud platform, we can achieve flexible scaling of computing resources, enhanced simulation efficiency, and improved accessibility for users. This project aims to develop several EDA tools including a CAD tool for chiplet design that supports automatic routing and routing performance evaluation. This project can be conducted as a BacheIor's Thesis/ Master's Thesis/ Research Internship (Forschungspraxis)/ Student Assistant Job. A detailed topic can be customized for you based on your interests and technical skills.

Prerequisites

Motivation

HW/SW Codesign, a technique that has been around for several decades, allows hardware designers
to take the target application into consideration and further enables software engineers to start
developing and testing firmware before actual hardware becomes available. This can drastically
reduce the time-to-market for new products and also comes with lower error rates compared to
conventional development cycles. Virtual prototyping is an important component in the typical
HW/SW-Codesign flow as software can be simulated at several abstraction layers (RTL-Level,
Instruction Level, Functional-Level) at early development stages, not only to find potential
hardware/software bugs but also to gain importation information regarding the expected
performance and efficiency metrics such as Runtime/Latency/Utilization.
Due to the increasing relevance of machine learning applications in our everyday lives, the co-
design and co-optimization on the hardware and models (HW/Model-Codesign) became more
popular, hence instead of the C/C++ code to be executed on the target device, the model
architecture and training aspects are aligned with the to be designed hardware or vice-versa.
However, due to the high complexity of nowadays machine learning frameworks and software
compilers, the deployment-related parameters also play a bigger role, which should be investigated
and exploited in the thesis.

Technical Background
The Embedded System Level (ESL) group at the EDA chair has a deep background in virtual
prototyping techniques. Recently, embedded machine learning became a highly exciting field of
research.
We are working primarily in an open-source software ecosystem. ETISS[1] is the instruction set
simulator that allows us to evaluate various embedded applications for different ISAs (nowadays
mainly RISC-V). Apache TVM[2] has been our ML deployment framework of choice for several
years now, especially due to its MicroTVM subproject. Our TinyML deployment and benchmarking
framework MLonMCU[3] is a powerful tool that enables us to evaluate different configurations of
tools fully automatically. However the actual candidates for evaluation need to be chosen manually,
which can lead to suboptimal results.

Task Description
In this project, an automated exploration for deployment parameters should be established. Further,
state-of-the-art optimization techniques must be utilized to find optimal sets of parameters in the
hyper-dimensional search space in an acceptable amount of time (no exhaustive search feasible).
The optimization should take multiple deployment metrics (for example, total runtime or memory
footprint) into account, yielding to a multi-objective optimization flow.
The to-be-implemented algorithms should build up on the existing tooling for prototyping and
benchmarking TinyML models developed at the EDA chair (ETISS & MLonMCU). If available,
existing libraries/packages for (hyper-parameter) optimization (for example, Optuna[4] or
XGBoost[5]) can be utilized.

First, a customizable objective function is required, which can be calculated, for example, based on
the weighted sum of relevant metrics determined using MLonMCU and should be later integrated
into the optimization algorithms.
To keep the complexity of the task low, the considered hardware and machine learning models can
be assumed as fixed. The workloads are further provided as already trained (and compressed)
models. The focus will thereby be solely on the deployment aspects of the machine learning
applications, which are mostly defined by the used machine learning and software compilers. The
search space grows in size heavily depending on the number of considered free variables, which can
be of different types (for example, categorical, discrete, sequential,…). Some examples are:
- Used data/kernel layout for convolution operations (NCHW, NHWC, HWIO, OHWI,…)
- Choice of kernel implementation (trivial, fallback, tuned, 3rd party kernel library, external,
accelerator,…)
- Compiler Flags (-O3/-Os/…, -fno-unroll,…)
It might turn out that some decisions might be helpful for some layers, while others would profit
from slightly or heavily different sets of parameters. Therefore, it should be possible to perform the
exploration on a per-layer fashion, which could yield even better results.
The optimization and exploration flow shall be visualized (for example Pareto plots) for the user
and executed in an efficient way to make sure of the available resources on our compute servers
(utilizing parallel processing and remote-execution features provided by MLonMCU)

Work Outline
1. Literature research
2. Setup toolset (MLonMCU → ETISS + TVM + muRISCV-NN)
3. Describe customizable objective/score functions for the optimization algorithm
4. Define search space(s) for deployment-parameter exploration
5. Develop automated exploration and optimization flow around the MLonMCU tool which
can take a batch of parameters and return the metrics used as inputs of the objective function
6. Investigate the potential of fine-grained (per-layer) optimization compared to a holistic (end-
to-end) approach
7. Optional: Introduce constraints (for example ROM footprint <1MB) to remove illegal
candidates from the search space (and potentially skip the time-consuming execution of
candidates)
8. Optional: Allow fast-estimation of deployment metrics by training a cost-model based on
the previous experiments.

References
[1] Mueller-Gritschneder, D., Devarajegowda, K., Dittrich, M., Ecker, W., Greim, M., & Schlichtmann, U. (2017, October). The
extendable translating instruction set simulator (ETISS) interlinked with an MDA framework for fast RISC prototyping. In
Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping: Shortening the Path from Specification to Prototype
(pp. 79-84). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/etiss
[2] Chen, T., Moreau, T., Jiang, Z., Shen, H., Yan, E. Q., Wang, L., ... & Krishnamurthy, A. (2018). TVM: end-to-end optimization
stack for deep learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04799, 11(2018), 20. GitHub: https://github.com/apache/tvm
[3] van Kempen, P., Stahl, R., Mueller-Gritschneder, D., & Schlichtmann, U. (2023, September). MLonMCU: TinyML
Benchmarking with Fast Retargeting. In Proceedings of the 2023 Workshop on Compilers, Deployment, and Tooling for Edge AI (pp.
32-36). GitHub: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/mlonmcu
[4] Akiba, T., Sano, S., Yanase, T., Ohta, T., & Koyama, M. (2019, July). Optuna: A next-generation hyperparameter optimization
framework. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery & data mining (pp. 2623-
2631). GitHub: https://github.com/optuna/optuna
[5] Chen, T., & Guestrin, C. (2016, August). Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of the 22nd acm sigkdd
international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 785-794). GitHub: https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost

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