Grenoble Comes to San Francisco

The headquarters of ST Microelectronics is officially in Switzerland, but in many ways the center of gravity is in the Grenoble area. You may have heard of Crolles where ST does process development, manufacturing and more, which is about ten miles north-east of the city. As a result, along with the CEA-LETI and Grenoble Institute of Technology (INP) being there, an ecosystem of small and medium sized companies (SME) in electronics and semiconductor has grown up. These are pulled together into an umbrella organization called Minalogic that stands for Micro-Nanotechnologies et Logiciel Grenoble-Isère Compétitivité which is obviously in French but the only word that may not be obvious is “logiciel” which is the French for software.

With 300 members, the Minalogic competitive cluster in Grenoble brings together major corporations, small and mid-sized businesses, universities and research centers, government agencies and organizations and investors from the public and private sectors. Minalogic’s goal is to foster research-led innovation in intelligent miniaturized products and solutions for industry. Since the creation of Minalogic in 2005, 388 projects have been certified and financed for total funding of €765 million (local and national funding), with a total R&D budget of €2 billion.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Minalogic is coming to DAC. The president of Minalogic is Philippe Magarshack who has been in a number of positions at ST over the years driving their CAD and technology strategies. Currently he is formally EVP and CTO of embedded processing solutions.

The “excuse” for the party is the celebrate the launch of Silicon Impulse, the new design center hosted by CEA-LETI to facilitate access to advanced technologies such as FD-SOI. The focus is very much Internet of Things (IoT) as Leti’s CEO Marie-Noëlle Semeria said when it was announced:With Silicon Impulse’s one-stop-shop platform, 28nm FD-SOI heterogeneous, low-power design becomes a reality for the IoT community. Silicon Impulse helps Leti’s partners introduce innovative products that deliver optimal performance for these applications, and benefit from the most advanced technologies. The center combines Leti’s large portfolio of leading-edge technologies and novel low-power design solutions with a unique service for speeding integration of FD-SOI and other more advanced technologies (ReRAM, MEMS, 3DVLSI, Silicon Photonics), enabling heterogeneous low-power co-integration.

The EDA Showcase France will be held at the W Hotel at 4pm on Monday 8th June. That is just across the street from the Moscone Center where you will probably already be. You will be able to meet many of the Grenoble companies since they are exhibiting at DAC: Asygn, Defacto Technologies, Docea Power, Edxact, Infiniscale, IROCtech, Magilem, Xyalis.

There will be an introductory speech by Philippe, a presentation by Jan Rabaey of UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, and more, on Design Trends and EDA Challenges from Connected Objects to Cloud Computing, followed by a networking reception until 6pm.

So save the date. And if you decide to go then there will be an opportunity to RSVP nearer the time. The Minalogic website is here (in English as well as French).