After having seen the transition from increasing processor speeds to increasing system-level parallelism and after realizing that energy, not the transistor budget is the limiting factor, a third trend is on the horizon and also already partially happening in todays CMOS systems, a transition from homogeneous to heterogeneous systems. At the same time we see an increasing use of homogeneous and heterogeous manycore systems on a chip in cyber-physical systems (CPS) and CPS infrastructures, systems which are increasingly exposed to advanced and persistent threats such as faults and attacks, not only by casual hackers, but also by highly skilled and well equipped adversaries.
In this talk, I present our work on DTUs and their use in the M3 kernel, a hardware mechanisms to uniformly control and coordinate wildly heterogeneous systems. By wildly heterogeneous we mean heterogeneous systems built with standard doped CMOS technologies that are gradually augmented with circuits and devices built from emerging meterials such as silicon nanowires or carbon nanotubes or that integrate the sensory and interfaces to conncet to novel computing fabrics such as microchemomechanical labs-on-a-chip. In the second part of this talk, I then focus on my current activities in the CritiX group of SNT - University of Luxembourg, sharing our plans and early results for making systems more tolerant to advanced and persistent threats.