Senior Researcher Tero Säntti

Introduction

I have been working in the general area of design of digital systems since 1999. In the early days i focused on transistor level design of very fast pipeline structures, namely asynchronous wave pipelines. That was also the topic of my M.Sc. thesis in 2002. Later on, around year 2004, I started designing a Java co-processor core and a virtual machine which uses the core. This development led to my Ph.D. dissertation in 2008. Since then I have expanded the Java co-processor system to support multiple parallel cores, and currently the largest system contains eight (8) cores. Naturally the system is actually implemented, using FPGA technology, instead of just being simulated. The FPGA technology has been gaining more and more of my research interests which now include embedded systems (both HW and SW), dynamic reconfiguration, fault tolerance and space applications.

Most recently I have moved towards imaging and image manipulation. Some of the work has been done on FPGA hardware, while some has been purely software. The topics include monitoring high power (10kW) laser welding, detecting space debris from telescope images and augmented reality related stuff.

I have been using FPGAs more and more, for both prototyping and also for final products. These include application areas ranging from satellite instruments through processor systems to camera setups. Often some PCB level components have been included in the FPGA prototype before all the components are available.

Image found on the web...