[TYPES/announce] Open postdoc positions (4 years) in "Formal Engineering Support for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays", combining FPGAs with formal methods

[Rüdiger Ehlers]

Dear all,

my research group at Clausthal University of Technology in Germany currently has 
*two open postdoc positions* to be filled, with funding for *four years* each. 
This is long enough for writing a German "Habilitation" thesis while holding the 
position.

The open positions are in the scope of the "Formal Engineering support for 
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays" endeavor (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation), in 
which we will bring the concept of reactive synthesis into the world of FPGAs.

While the theory of reactive synthesis has matured in the last decades, industrial 
use of automatically synthesized implementations is still quite rare. The endeavor 
through which the postdoc positions are funded has the potential to change this. 
Its aim is to adapt synthesis game constructions, strategy extraction processes, 
and the computational engines employed in the game solving process so that they 
are best suited for synthesizing implementations for field-programmable gate 
arrays (FPGAs). These are, in a way, reconfigurable digital circuits and have an 
excellent energy-efficiency in a good range of applications. Manual development of 
their implementations is more difficult than programming software, which is why 
they are only used in few applications despite FPGA-based data center solutions 
being available nowadays.  A particular aim is that the synthesized 
implementations should be able to use big blocks of FPGA-based implementations for 
multiple purposes by time-sharing, which is often avoided in manual 
implementations due to the complexity of doing so. Employing reactive synthesis 
for coordinating the computation processes in FPGA-based implementations thus has 
the potential to make the performance of synthesized implementations even better 
than most manual implementations, which would make the approach interesting for 
industry as well.

Further information about my research group is available at 
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.isse.tu-clausthal.de/en/research/research-groups-1/acps-automating-cps-design__;!!IBzWLUs!WtkWcOhqH78vJ71cUrsoi4_I39l0uVbpVS-abGqSM9jCIykw4v9661Vy4mJKa8EbfM_Dgs7wD5cQfF0K0PGnx5sUNyOuRUl1nKaaGtc12WIZsRZO$  
and a longer description of the endeavor in particular can be found at 
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.isse.tu-clausthal.de/en/research/research-groups-1/acps-automating-cps-design/formal-engineering-support-for-field-programmable-gate-arrays__;!!IBzWLUs!WtkWcOhqH78vJ71cUrsoi4_I39l0uVbpVS-abGqSM9jCIykw4v9661Vy4mJKa8EbfM_Dgs7wD5cQfF0K0PGnx5sUNyOuRUl1nKaaGtc12XyzXdWP$ 

An official job advertisement can be found at: 
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tu-clausthal.de/universitaet/karriere-ausbildung/stellenangebote/wissenschaftlicher-dienst/research-assistant-m/f/d-1__;!!IBzWLUs!WtkWcOhqH78vJ71cUrsoi4_I39l0uVbpVS-abGqSM9jCIykw4v9661Vy4mJKa8EbfM_Dgs7wD5cQfF0K0PGnx5sUNyOuRUl1nKaaGtc12XRj5UnV$ 

The application deadline is the 4th of February. Slightly late applications are 
likely to also be considered. Starting date is the 1st of April or a bit later. If 
you want to apply, please send your application to: info at isse.tu-clausthal.de. If 
you have any questions, please send an e-mail to ruediger.ehlers at tu-clausthal.de - 
I will be happy to answer.