2024 IEEE 37th International System-on-Chip Conference

Tomorrow sees the start of the 37th IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC) in Dresden. Last night saw the legendary Kraftwerk play live in the city. I am not sure if the organisers of the conference arranged that but they have certainly been very helpful in supporting a a Special Session for SoC Labs on Thursday. 

The session will once again introduce SoC Labs and the Arm Academic Access and through a sample of community project efforts demonstrate the impact and potential of community driven hardware design initiatives to bridge the skills gap and accelerate the pace of innovation. We hope to encourage the community into greater reuse and to share expertise among the academic community.

There will also be some exciting news on chiplet based SoC designs leading into 2025!

We have a great set of projects to present with two of last years entrants explaining their lessons learned and three new projects for this year.

Epifanios Baikas, University of Southampton

Epifanios will share his journey as a new PhD student in undertaking a project to tape out a custom accelerator combined with the SoC Labs nanoSoC reference design. A journey from algorithm concept to custom ASIC in 65nm TSMC with live demonstration of the working device. This project is a great example of how common reference design patterns and lost cost fabrication and validation pathways help create opportunity for new academics and students to engage in SoC design.

Yarramsetty Vaivaswatha Sai Dinesh, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Dinesh will share his teams work on a large arm A class CPU based SoC. He will discuss the challenges of developing large real time SoC designs and the utilisation of compute resources of the host CPU and a reconfigurable custom accelerator and their impact on the memory requirements for SoC design. It will highlight common design considerations around flow of data into and out of the custom compute and through the SoC as a whole.

Lewis Watts, University of Sydney

Lewis will present their project on Sensing for Precision Agriculture, one of the environment sensing projects from the current SoC Labs mixed signal design contest. The project aims to develop multi-modal sensing network devices for precision agriculture field management.

Zaheer Khan, University of Oulu

Zaheer will present a project looking at advanced digital signal processing for hardware acceleration of Interference Detection and Mitigation in Automotive Radar. The project aims to tackle the issue of mutual wireless interference as the number of vehicles using radar increases and interference may compromise the safety of such systems.

Rami Hariri, Anglia Ruskin University

Rami will present a project developing a SoC for atrial fibrillation detection, an example of the medical decision support projects under development. He will discuss how the project is investigating how to optimise the inference model and the SoC design for an efficient and low cost sensing system.