Hardware ARchitectures and CAD tools (ARCAD) team

ARCAD is a multidisciplinary team in electrical and computer engineering.

The ARCAD team’s purpose: application objectives

high performances
low energy consumption
high security (resistance to attacks) and reliability (resistance to faults)
low cost (small area and flexibility by reconfiguration)

Research areas concerning hardware architectures

analog/digital functions, computation units, IP blocks
accelerators, special purpose processors
reconfigurable architectures: CGRA, special purpose, virtual
parallel architectures
secure architectures, protection against logical and physical attacks

Research areas concerning software support and tools

special purpose CAD tools: synthesis, P&R, operator/circuit generation
high-level synthesis
low-level libraries for our architectures

Multidisciplinary expertise in digital, electronic and computer systems

Embedded systems
Cybersecurity
Embedded software
Hardware accelerators/FPGAs
Co-design
Processors
Compilation
Algorithm-architecture matching
Prototyping

Examples of projects

Protection against intellectual property theft in electronics: code obfuscation techniques

Research program name: "Protection against intellectual property theft in electronics: code obfuscation techniques for HLS synthesis chains in SaaS mode"
began at the end of 2017
financed by the Brittany region
led by Jean-Christophe Le Lann (research professor)
partner: Politechnico di Milano (public scientific-technological university which trains engineers, architects and industrial designers, based in Milan)
thesis by Hannah Boenning Badier, defended in 2021

The PhD student and team explored various promising avenues in terms of obfuscation (security through obscurity), which involves incorporating a discreet "tattoo" into a computer code using artificial intelligence techniques.

Trojan horses were also designed as part of this project in a bid to more clearly understand the implications of such hardware threats and to consider countermeasures at the time of design.

Jean-Christophe Le Lann: "This original project is set to continue with support from the Cyber Center of Excellence. It is of interest to the French Defense, Procurement and Technology Agency (DGA) and will be the subject of a second thesis beginning in 2022."