creator Niu, Sufeng advisor Saniie, Jafar System-On-Chip (SOC) is one of the most popular Computer Aided Design (CAD) methodologies in electronic system design. In this research, SOC design is investigated in two different types of applications: i) low cost and power efficient applications; and ii) high performance computing applications. To explore low cost and power efficient design, a microcontroller based wireless medical system is investigated. Two wireless communication protocols for medical applications and patient monitoring are analyzed. In addition, the ZigBee stack developed by TI and a medical amplifier are discussed. For high performance SOC applications, implementations of several matrix operations are examined. An improved fixed-point hardware design of QR decomposition is introduced and optimized for Xilinx FPGAs. A Givens Rotation algorithm is implemented using a folded systolic array and the CORDIC algorithm. This approach is highly suitable for high-speed FPGAs or ASIC designs. It is found that the Xilinx XC5VLX110T FPGA is capable of running the QR decomposition at 246MHz. Submitted by Dana Lamparello (dlampare@iit.edu) on 2012-08-21T19:16:04Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Sufeng Niu MS Thesis.pdf: 1436547 bytes, checksum: 09c452136c0aae40f8e90dc7d527b468 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2012-08-21T19:16:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sufeng Niu MS Thesis.pdf: 1436547 bytes, checksum: 09c452136c0aae40f8e90dc7d527b468 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05 M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 2012 2012-04-30 2012-05 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2809 en Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access ECE / Electrical and Computer Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department