Best Paper Award - International Symposium on System-on-Chip 2010

Adolf Abdallah, Abdoulaye Gamatie and Jean-Luc Dekeyser (DaRT team, LIFL and INRIA) received awards at the International Symposium on System-on-Chip 2010, held in Tampere (Finland) in September 2010.

The Best Paper Award went to their paper Correct and Energy-Efficient Design of SoCs.

The theme: Anticipating and analyzing the correctness and efficiency of System-on-Chip designs.

A short summary of the article:

Embedded systems-on-chip are now widely present in the electronic devices we use every day. An emblematic example is mobile telephony, where a rich palette of applications (music, video, photography, internet, etc.) share a common execution medium: a microchip.

As technology evolves, the number of functionalities integrated on chips is set to grow significantly. For reasons of cost and device reliability, design approaches will necessarily have to adapt, while controlling the resulting level of complexity.

In this context, we propose a design approach based on abstract models reflecting certain characteristics of a system: functionalities and information on the execution platform (processors, memory, etc.). These models are sufficiently expressive to study the correction of a system's behaviors, and its efficiency with regard to criteria such as computation time performance and energy consumption. In addition, these models enable us to explore the space of design choices rapidly, without being penalized by the complexity of the system, and with reasonable effort.

Within the DaRT research team, our solution is defined within the Gaspard2 environment, dedicated to the joint design of high-performance systems-on-chips.

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