Water scarcity for agriculture is one of the most important challenges to improve food security worldwide. In this thesis we study the potential to develop a low-cost controller for a small scale brackish desalination plant that consists of proven water treatment technologies, reverse osmosis, cation exchange, and nanofiltration to treat groundwater into two final products: drinking water and irrigation water. The plant is powered by a combination of wind and solar power systems. The low-cost controller uses Arduino Mega, and Arduino DUE, which consist of ATmega2560 and Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU microcontrollers. These are widely used systems characterized for good performance and low cost. However, Arduino also requires drivers and interfaces to allow the control and monitoring of sensors and actuators. The thesis explains the process, as well as the hardware and software implemented.

A modified, single error-correcting, and double error detecting Hamming code, hereafter referred to as modified SEC-DED Hamming code, is proposed in this research. The code requires fewer logic gates to implement than the SEC-DED Hamming code. Also, unlike the popular Hsiao's code, the proposed code can determine the error in the received word from its syndrome location in the parity check matrix. A detailed analysis of the area and power utilization by the encoder and decoder circuits of the modified SEC-DED Hamming code is also discussed. Results demonstrate that this code is an excellent alternative to Hsiao's code as the area and power values are very similar. In addition, the ability to locate the error in the received word from its syndrome is also of particular interest. Primitive polynomials play a crucial role in the hardware realizations for error-correcting codes. This research describes an implementation of a scalable primitive polynomial circuit with coefficients in GF(2). The standard cell area and power values for various degrees of the circuit are analyzed. The physical design of a degree 6 primitive polynomial computation circuit is also provided. In addition to the codes, a background of the already existing SPX GCD computation algorithm is …