Heterogeneous Systems Design
Head of the group:
The pursuit of Moore’s Law is slowing and severe difficulties are foreseen at technology nodes beyond 14nm, mainly for economic reasons. Consequently manufacturing technology, the traditional vector for progress in the field of integrated circuits, is undergoing profound changes, bringing alternatives to simple scaling. 3D integration enables the diversification of technologies to support ever more numerous and more powerful applications, while the exploration of alternative devices is underway to replace the CMOS transistor at the heart of data processing, storage and transmission functions.
Moreover, we are witnessing the emergence of stringent application constraints, particularly those linked to energy consumption, which require new system architectural strategies (e.g. manycore) and real-time operational adaptability approaches. The advent of the Internet of Things and cloud computing is based on ultra-low-power embedded systems (pJ/bit) to instrument and interact autonomously with the physical environment in real time, as well as on high-performance computing centers to handle and store, in a secure way, the exabytes of collected data. Such incredibly complex systems require new and extremely powerful methods for design, verification and test to ensure optimal and reliable operation.
In this context,the main research objectives of the Heterogeneous Systems Design group concern the novel, or more efficient, use of emerging nanoelectronic devices and/or integrated sensors and actuators in innovative architectures for multi-domain integrated systems on chip (SoC).
