source: anr/section-dissemination.tex @ 381

\anrdoc{A titre indicatif: 2 pages pour ce chapitre.\\
Presenter les strategies de valorisation des resultats:
\begin{itemize}
\item la communication scientifique;
\item la communication aupres du grand public (un budget specifique peut être prevu),
\item la valorisation des resultats attendus,
\item les retombees scientifiques, techniques, industrielles, economiques, ...
\item la place du projet dans la strategie industrielle des entreprises partenaires du projet
\item autres retombees (normalisation, information des pouvoirs publics, ...)
\item les echeances et la nature des retombees technico- economiques attendues
\item l'incidence eventuelle sur l'emploi, la creation d'activites nouvelles.
\end{itemize}
Presenter les grandes lignes des modes de protection et d'exploitation des resultats\\
Pour les projets partenariaux organismes de recherche/entreprises, les
partenaires devront conclure, sous l'egide du coordinateur du projet, un
accord de consortium dans un delai de un an si le projet est retenu pour
financement.\\
Pour les projets academiques, l'accord de consortium n'est pas obligatoire
mais fortement conseille.}

\subsection{Dissemination}

The COACH project will generate new scientific results in various fields, such as high level synthesis,
hardware/software codesign, virtual prototyping, hardware oriented compilation techniques,
automatic parallelization, etc. These results will be published in relevant International
Conferences, for instance DATE, DAC, or ICCAD. 
\\
More generally, the COACH infrastructure and the design flow supported by the COACH
tools and libraries will be promoted by proposing tutorials on FPGA oriented system level synthesis
in various workshops and conferences (DATE, DAC, CODES+ISSS...).
\parlf
Several COACH partners being members of the HiPEAC European Network of Excellence 
(High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation), courses will be proposed for the
HiPEAC summer school on Advanced Computer Architecture and Compilation for Embedded Systems.
\parlf
The COACH project will be an open infrastructure, and the COACH tools and libraries will be available via
a WEB server. This server will be maintained by the UPMC/LIP6 laboratory.
\\
On the standardization side, some effort will be made for analysing how the work around IP-XACT 
could be donated for the evolution of the IEEE 1685 standard. \mds is board member of
Accellera, TRT, TIMA and LIP6 are members, so we will try to have some influence and at least
communicate on the fact that our solutions will be compatible with the standard.

\subsection{Industrial exploitation of results}

The main goal of the COACH project is to help SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and even small design team in larger entities
to enter the world of MPSoC technologies. For small companies or design services, the cost is a primary concern.
Moreover, these companies seldom have in-home expertise in hardware design and VHDL modelling.
As the fabrication costs of an ASIC is generally too high for SMEs, the COACH project focus
on FPGA technologies. Regarding the design tools, the cost of advanced ESL (Electronic System Design) 
tools is an issue, and the COACH project will follow the same general policy as the SoCLib platform :

\begin{itemize}
\item
All software tools supporting the COACH design flow will be available as free software.
All academic partners contributing to the COACH project agreed to distribute the ESL software
tools under the same GPL license.
\item
The SystemC simulation models for the hardware components
used by the SoCLib architectural template will be distributed as free software 
under a non-contaminant LGPL license.
\item
The synthesizable VHDL models supporting the neutral architectural template
(corresponding to the SocLib IP cores library), will have two modes of dissemination.
A typical MPSoC contains not only dedicated, synthesized coprocessors. It contains
also general purpose, reusable components, such as processor cores, memory controllers
optimised cache controllers, peripheral controllers, or bus controllers.
For non commercial use (i.e. research or education in an academic context,  
or feasibility study in an industrial context), the synthesizable VHDL models will be freely available.
For commercial use, commercial licenses will be negotiated between the owners and the customers.
\item
The proprietary \altera and \xilinx IP core libraries are commercial products
that are not involved by the free software policy, but these libraries will be supported by the 
synthesis tools developed in the COACH project.
\item
\mds will propose a commercial version of COACH, integrated into an \mds tool suite and compatible with a standard IP-XACT flow.
This version will integrate some generic features, already available for
production (some of them from a standard \mds pack, some other developed in
COACH). Other COACH features will have to be tailored for the specifics of the
customer framework and will generate service business.
\end{itemize}

This general approach is supported by a large number (\letterOfInterestNb) of SMEs, as
demonstrated by the "letters of interest" that have been collected during the preparation
of the project and presented in annexe~\ref{lettre-soutien}.

\subsection{Industrial Interest in COACH}

\subsubsection*{Partner: \textit{\mds}}
The interest for \mds in this project is multiple. 
\begin{itemize}
\item
We will collaborate in experiments for the integration of High Level Synthesis
engines into IP-XACT based flow.  This point will be very valuable because more
and more system integrators are using or considering the use of HLS in their development flow
(e.g. Astrium, Airbus, etc.).
\item
\mds has already a leading position in the usage of IP-XACT standard for
managing innovative SoC design methodologies. This project will allow to keep
this competitive advance by anticipating the next generation
platforms hosting multi-cores and programmable logic for coprocessors.
\item
HPC is a topic that was not covered yet by \mds with its customers. Thanks to
this project, \mds will collaborate with BULL on this point and this will open
doors for new customers market.
\item
This project has been set up for maximizing the industrial exploitation of results.
The role of \mds will be to ensure this objective and after the project, we
expect a growing contribution for rising the turnover
(2015: 2 new customers = 100 k\euro,
 2016: 4 new customers = 250 k\euro,
 2017: 5 new customers = 400 k\euro).
These numbers are not high but we tried to keep them realistic. 
The return on investment is nevertheless important and we can also expect side
effects of this project on sales with existing customers and prospects
interested in the global \mds solution.
\end{itemize}

\subsubsection*{Partner: \textit{\bull}}
\noindent
The Bull team participating in COACH is from the Server Design and Development Division,
which is in charge of developing hardware for open servers (e.g.: NovaSacle, Bullion) and
HPC solutions. With this participation, Bull demonstrates its high interest in the outcome of
COACH. Effectively, it is now commonly recognized that the future of HPC will be based
on hybrid architectures in which FPGA will play a major role in the development of configurable
hardware accelerators by providing the best fine grain parallelism.

\subsubsection*{Partner: \textit{\thales}}
\noindent
\thales has two main reasons to use the COACH platform:
\begin{itemize}
  \item The huge increase of the complexity of the systems in particular by their
  heterogeneity, raises the issues of design cost and time in the same proportion. The
  divisions need a design tool which supports the implementation of the applications from
  algorithm description to the executable code on platforms composed of several general
  purpose processors and dedicated IPs.
  \item The applications are more and more complex and adaptable to the environment which
  leads to a mixture of control aspects and data stream computing aspects. A new approach
  is necessary to be able to describe this type of application and manage the high level
  synthesis of system embedding control and data flow aspects.
\end{itemize}
%
TRT (Thales Research and Technology) has the mission to assess and de-risk the emerging
technologies in its domains of expertise. Specifically in COACH, the studied technology is
a method and associated tools to bridge the gap between application capture at system
level and the implementation on heterogeneous distributed computing architectures. The
main stake for Thales behind this is the future design process that will be applied to its
system teams for computation-intensive sensor applications. In a context
of very unstable market of tools for parallel programming, it is important to experiment
and demonstrate the candidate technologies.
\\
In its role of internal dissemination, TRT will make the demonstration of the full design
flow within Thales, and will keep available a platform to later evaluate additional
applications coming from the Business Units.
\\
The COACH platform will be used in the new \thales products in which the algorithms are more
and more dependent of the environment and have to permanently adapt their behavior in
varying environments. The target markets are the critical infrastructures security and
border monitoring.

\subsubsection*{Industrial supports}

The following SMEs demonstrate interest to the COACH project (see the "letters of
interest" in annexe~\ref{lettre-soutien}) and will follow the COACH evolution and will
evaluate it:
\letterOfInterest{ALTERA Corporation}{lettres-2011/Altera1.pdf},
\letterOfInterestPlus{lettres-2011/Altera2.pdf}
\letterOfInterest{FlexRAS Technologies}{lettres-2011/Flexras.pdf},
\letterOfInterest{INPIXAL}{lettres-2011/Inpixal.jpg},
\letterOfInterest{CAMKA System}{lettres-2011/Camka.pdf},
\letterOfInterest{RENESAS Design}{lettres-2011/Renesas-dossier.jpg},
\letterOfInterest{EADS-ASTRIUM}{lettres-2011/Astrium.pdf}.
%\letterOfInterest{ADACSYS}{lettres-2011/Coach_ADACSYS_lettre_interet},
%\letterOfInterest{ATEME}{lettres-2011/ATEME.pdf},
%\letterOfInterest{ALSIM Simulateur}{lettres-2011/Alsim.pdf},
%\letterOfInterest{SILICOMP-AQL}{lettres-2011/itlabs.pdf},
%\letterOfInterest{ABOUND Logic}{lettres-2011/abound.pdf},
\letterOfInterestClose

\subsection{Management of Intellectual Property}
A global consortium agreement will be defined during the first six months of the project.
As already stated, the COACH project has been prepared during one year by a monthly meeting 
involving the five academic partners. The general free software policy described in the 
previous section has been agreed by academic partners  and has been
approved by all industrial participants. This free software policy will 
simplify the definition of the consortium agreement.