International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Chair of Hardware/Software Co-Design at FAU explores methodologies for designing and optimizing computing systems with high demands on availability, performance, and security.

Ensuring security in IoT systems, particularly confidentiality and integrity of data and application code, is a major challenge. While hardware security, crypto modules, secure boot, and trusted execution environments offer protection, they often increase costs and energy consumption.

This position focuses on system-level design automation for secure embedded systems-on-chip. The goal is to develop a methodology for design space exploration that generates secure architectures and evaluates countermeasures' impact on security, energy, cost, and performance. Additionally, the research includes high-level synthesis techniques to implement secure design candidates as FPGA-based system-on-chip prototypes.

• Conduct research in embedded computer architectures and hardware security.
• Explore security-aware hardware/software co-design, system-level design space exploration, and multi-objective optimization.
• Apply high-level synthesis techniques to integrate security mechanisms into SoC designs and prototype them on FPGA platforms.

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Skills and interest in computer architecture, hardware security, system-level design automation, object-oriented programming, hardware description languages, SoC design, RISC-V, or FPGA tools.
• Team-oriented, open-minded, and communicative, with an interest in both theoretical and practical aspects of embedded systems.
• High proficiency in English (German is a plus).