Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

ANR Architectures du Futur - ROMA: Reconfigurable Operators for Multimedia Applications (2007-2010)

Participants : Emmanuel Casseau, Antoine Floch, Shafqat Khan, Daniel Ménard, François Charot, Christophe Wolinski, Erwan Raffin, Olivier Sentieys.

ROMA is an ANR "architectures du futur" project which involves IRISA-Cairn , CEA-LIST, CNRS-LIRMM and Thomson R&D France. The ROMA project proposes to develop both a design methodology and a reconfigurable processor able to adapt its computing structure to video and image processing applications. The processor is built around a pipeline of coarse grain reconfigurable operators exhibiting efficient power and performance features. Flexibility is obtained through the use of mutable units. These units can be configured for the implemented function, the number representation of the data and the data bit-width. The configuration of the processor is dynamically done all along the application depending on the tasks that are to be carried out. Higher performance in terms of power consumption and computing power, with at least one-magnitude order with regards to state-of-the-art energy-efficient reconfigurable architectures, is expected. Cairn is the leader of this project. For more details see http://roma.irisa.fr . ROMA successfully ended in September 2010.