Dear All, We are looking for a top candidate to join our research group as a PhD student. We have one opening in the area of Smalltalk-based Electronic Design Automation. Please could you broadcast to any interested student. The position is to be filled as soon as possible. The project starts on 1st october 2011. Kind Regards, LoIc Lagadec ARDyT - Fault tolerant dynamically reconfigurable architecture Position type: PhD Student Functional area: Brest, France Research theme: Smalltalk, Reconfigurable architecture, innovative toolkit design Project: ARDyT Contact: loic.lagadec@univ-brest.fr Title: Instrospection plan compliant EDA toolset Reconfigurable computing (eg. FPGAs) combines the flexibility of software with the high performances of hardware. This comes from the on-demand metamorphosis of the hardware - at runtime - by "loading" a new circuit on the reconfigurable fabric, while this technology also supports extreme optimizations, by allowing drastic changes to the datapath itself, in addition to tailoring the control flow as traditionaly met in microprocessors. While improving performances has been the key issue for years, very few efforts have been reported in debug automation. Debuging requires introspection capabilities, controlability and fast-changes support. HLS (High Level Synthesis) tools allow to compile high-level (C like) languages to netlist (electronic level), hence guarantee fast changes but controlability and instrospection are still very limited. In the scope of the ARDyT project (supported by the French National Research Agency), some evolutions will be carried out over a classical FPGA such as embedding extra resources that will offer some introspection capabilities. The PhD thesis will contribute to refactor/re-design an existing smalltalk based toolset in order to take into account these extra resources hence new paradigms such as to combine the computation plan and the instrospection plan of the proposed architecture. In addition, debug controllers will be made available on-demand within the netlist of the application. This offers new exciting perspectives, in a scope of domain space exploration (DSE). A model oriented approach will be considered to ensure the durability of the resulting software and of its design method. This PhD will be co-supervised by the Lab-STICC MOCS and IRISA.