CEA-LETI

LETI (Laboratory for Electronics & Information Technology) is operated by the Technology Department of CEA (DRT "Direction de la Recherche Technologique"), the French Atomic Energy Commission. LETI is one of the largest European applied research laboratories in the field of electronics: permanent staff is approximately 1200 people. The main activities of CEA/LETI are dealing with electronics, microelectronics, microsystems and IC design.

Its corporate goal is to bring technological innovation to the European industry, and to create added value through an active Intellectual Property policy based on the management of strong patent portfolio (> 500 active patents, and more than 140 filings/year) and the licensing of its technologies. For more than ten years, LETI has been working on wireless systems for several applications fields: medical (indoor), military (outdoor), robotics, mobiles phones and communications with mobiles (cars, trains, underground, etc.). LETI is currently involved in several R&D telecom project of the 6th Framework.

The DCIS Department (DCIS: "Conception et Intégration des Systèmes") at LETI is in charge of the IC design activities, and is currently addressing the following topics:

• digital and mixed chip design for telecom, smart cards, RFID, image processing, smart devices, etc.
• architecture exploration (HW/SW partitioning, performance evaluation, etc.)
• design flow methodology (SystemC/TLM methodology, XML/Spirit, Matlab/Simulink? co simulation, etc).

An important concern at LETI is the design of mixed signal, multi-physics systems with sensors/activators (MEMS, MOEMS, etc.), RF front-end and complex SOC design and architecture.

LETI is now reference as a world wide key actor in the field of network on chip (NOC) architecture: refer to LETI papers at the ISSCC'07 conference. An innovative Software Defined Radio platform based on fully distributed communication and control system has been designed. This architecture framework is targeting complex data flow applications. The backbone of the architecture is a layered asynchronous NOC that brings scalability at architecture level and flexibility at the application level. Silicon proves these concepts, and is currently used for complex Radio Access technology experimentation.

LETI is developing a new complex MPSoC architecture for data streaming applications. This architecture will be designed on advanced CMOS 65nm technology. For this MPSoC, LETI we will have to answer issues of dynamic application mapping and power optimisation under real time constraints. LETI expect to take benefit from the ADAM project and partnership on the following points:

• applying programming models for distributed and parallel architectures,based on LIP6 experience
• taking benefit from dynamic mapping strategies to support dynamic reconfiguration for interoperability, and power optimisation by tasks allocation and voltage/frequency scaling, based on LIP6 and LIRMM experiences
• evaluating the applicability on realistic application scenarios of distributed adaptive and recursive mapping strategies for parallel MPSoC architectures