CISTER researcher Benny Åkesson has co-authored a book, Memory controllers for Mixed-Time-Criticality Systems - Architectures, Methodologies and Trade-offs. The book discusses the design and performance analysis of SDRAM controllers that cater to both real-time and best-effort applications. The authors describe the state of the art, an architecture template for reconfigurable memory controllers that addresses evolving set of SDRAM standards, in terms of worst-case timing and power analysis, as well as a prototype implementation in System C and synthesizable VHDL for an FPGA development board.

João Loureiro spent six weeks at the University of York, at the Department of Computer Science, in an internship under the supervision of Leandro Indrusiak. The Department is a prestigious institution, with great domain knowledge on Networks-on-Chip (NoC), which is directly related to his topic of interest. The aim of the visit was to acquire knowledge in the domain, especially on the analysis of real-time applications on NoC-like architectures, to be applied on his ongoing PhD research at CISTER.

Shashank Gaur visited the Networked Embedded Software Lab (NESLab), to work with Luca Mottola. NESLab is a research laboratory based at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, where research combines theories, designs, implementations and deployments of networked embedded sensors and actuators. NESLab is headed by Luca Mottola who is also a senior researcher with SICS Swedish ICT. During the visit, Shashank worked on problems related to complex adaptation policies in programming applications for sensor networks. The visit was helpful in identifying the potential problem, use case scenarios, constructing a generic model and discussion on possible solutions.

In the area of real time systems, RTSS is recognized world-wide as the flagship conference, presenting innovations in the field with respect to theory and practice. RTSS provides a forum for the presentation of high-quality, original research covering all aspects of real-time systems theory, design, analysis, implementation, evaluation, and experiences. This year, RTSS will be held in Porto, with Eduardo Tovar, director of CISTER, and Luís Almeida, Professor at the University of Porto, serving as local arrangements chairs. Also, two CISTER researchers, Eduardo Tovar and Vincent Nelis, have been invited to serve as PC members. This year again, the number and quality of the papers submitted and the low acceptance ratio of the conference suggests a very successful top-ranked scientific event.