Design and realization of hardware architectures and dedicated circuits

Often, the development of dedicated electronic circuits allows the realization of very innovative hardware solutions. In particular, the development of hardware modules whereas information comes from a physical interface, such as in communications networks or in systems for real-time data acquisition, can be very useful for reducing elaboration times with respect to the case of elaboration by software algorithms. Besides, dedicated hardware solutions reduce the work of the CPU and more cycles are available for other activities; so, the throughput of the elaboration may be notably increased. In this context, several digital circuits to be employed in computer networks have been developed.

CRC computing by parallel hardware

A new technique for hardware calculation of Cyclic Redundancy Codes (CRC) has been presented in [MyTCCRC]. Such codes are used both for verifying the integrity of information after transmission (i.e., it has not been corrupted by noise) and for cryptographic purposes. In this work, a new digital implementation of a circuit able to process many bits in parallel is presented; such a parallelism allows the increase of the computing speed with respect to the serial version present in literature.

Hardware switching techniques for high-speed networks

A switched architecture for multi-connected network, based on programmable logic circuits, is proposed in [MyHwNwDesign], [MyHwNwCaseStudy]. Such a system is able to execute the routing algorithm by hardware circuits and can be reprogrammed as many times as the user needs; so, it can be used for different network topologies and different routing algorithms. Besides, a new  design methodology  that allows the evaluation of both the complexity and the performance of the hardware system before its realization is presented.