Computing Fabric for high performance Applications (COBRA)

Themes: Electronic systems and VLSI design

Hardwired SoC architectures suffer from a lack of flexibility regarding market evolution, resulting in an excessive design cycle time and increased cost. Furthermore, process variability is not yet well addressed for 32 nm and beyond. The objective of COBRA is to develop and experiment an open, flexible and high performance platform by substituting heterogeneous hardware/software sub-systems by a regular array of processors. The platform will be driven by Telecom, Video and Multimedia benchmark applications and demonstrated on 32nm silicon with 3D stacking.

The objective of COBRA is to develop and experiment an open, flexible and high performance platform by substituting heterogeneous mixed HW/SW specialized sub-systems by an application specific processor array. This massively parallel computing fabric will also improve manufacturability and energy efficiency of new Systems On Chip, due to its design regularity, while at the same time maximising flexibility by allowing software product derivatives to be generated. Software product derivatives will reduce development and manufacturing costs as well as Time-to-market when compared with hardwired alternatives.

For more information, see the project homepage.