Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Our work on accuracy evaluation and optimisation for fixed point arithmetic was presented during a tutorial "Fixed-point refinement, a guaranteed approach towards energy efficient computing" at IEEE/ACM Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE'15) [70] .

Some Granit out of Cairn... The GRANIT team at IRISA is a spin-off of the CAIRN team created in January 2015, and all of the GRANIT members were formerly belonging to CAIRN. This decision was motivated by two main reasons: CAIRN had reached a critical size (nearly twenty permanent researchers) and the scope of its research was becoming really broad. During the last period, the global scope of CAIRN was the research of new architectures, algorithms and design methods for flexible and energy efficiency domain-specific system-on-chip (SoC), promoting the use of reconfigurable hardware. The research activities of CAIRN were organized around three main topics: (i) The invention and the design of new reconfigurable platforms with an emphasis on flexible arithmetic operator design, dynamic reconfiguration management and low-power consumption. (ii) The development of their corresponding design flows (compilation and synthesis tools) to enable their automatic design from high-level specifications. (iii) The interaction between algorithms and architectures especially for wireless communications and wireless sensor networks. In brief, the two first topics will still be investigated by CAIRN, while GRANIT will explore the third one, with a new focus on algorithm and architecture adaptivity and cooperation between wireless nodes.

Awards The paper "Energy-Aware Computing via Adaptive Precision under Performance Constraints in OFDM Wireless Receivers" [39] received the best paper at the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI).

Best Paper Award:

[39]