The goal of the LACIS's project is to demonstrate the validity of a new approach for color and spectral imaging sensor and camera systems. The demonstration will be given by building one or two prototypes showing the functionality of the novel approach and measuring the improvement compared to the state of the art. The novel approach is based on two principles inspired from the human visual system. First, human retina consist of a mosaic of cone photoreceptors (LMS) but the mosaic arrangement of cones is changing from individual to individual without impinging on color vision capability of the individual. A generalization of this principle would say that we can build a color sensor with any arrangement of color samples in the color filter array that cover the camera. This flexibility of sensor colorization allows optimizing the sensor for many type of application, particularly those that need multispectral encoding. Our prototypes would be therefore equipped with different color filter array and the performance of these different sensors will be tested. Second, instead of being perfectly linear with light intensity, the human retina response is non-linear and adaptive. Adaptation to light allows the human visual system to be sensitive to a large range of light value despite the noisy nature of the retina cells. We will implement this property on the prototypes in analog, before the analog to digital converter to prevent from noise amplification due to digitalization. A previous prototype have already been build and tested favorably by two members of the project. A new implementation has been proposed for a patent and will be implemented in the project. The general goal of the project is to build a demonstrator composed by (1) new filters, either pseudo-random 6x6 RGB, or multispectral based on COLOR SHADE technology, (2) a locally adaptive color CMOS sensor and (3) a motherboard including embedded processing for color or spectral image reconstruction optimized for spatio-spectral information. The demonstrator will be given by a functioning prototype that will deliver images of size 256x256 and showing the properties of the new approach for color or spectral sensor. The consortium is composed on three entities, two laboratories (LPNC, TIMA) and a company (SILIOS Technologies). The two laboratories have already worked together on a first prototype of light adaptive sensor. TIMA is well recognized in microelectronic and have a long achievement in sensor building. LPNC has developed several models for spatio-spectral representation and demosaicing method as well as high dynamic range and tone mapping inspired from human vision. SILIOS is a SME that develops technology and know-how on micro-optics and more specifically on multispectral filters for spectrometry and multispectral imaging. The project will open new products and skill for the company and new intellectual property for the consortium.

Secure circuits embed hardware primitives that provide security properties: Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) or attack sensors, for example. These only fulfil their role when powered, which makes a new class of attacks that would be carried out when the targeted circuit is powered off particularly worrying. The aim of our project is precisely to verify the feasibility of laser attacks on powered-off devices and to propose suitable countermeasures to protect against these attacks. In order to carry out this work, we first plan to design in-house and then have an external service provider manufacture a test circuit with carefully selected elementary blocks and simple security primitives for characterisation, testing and modelling purposes. We then plan to carry out laser injection campaigns on this circuit, but also on other circuits already available from the project partners. These experimental campaigns can therefore start at the beginning of the project. This first stage will lead to the development of a fault model, describing the observed faults as exhaustively as possible, at different levels of abstraction: physical, logical and functional. Once we understand the effects of laser attacks on powered-off devices, we plan to apply the resulting fault model to two classical examples of safety primitives. For the PUF, the aim will be to disprove the unclonability property, by experimentally modifying the statistical distribution of the identifiers generated by the PUF. This could go as far as gaining precise control of individual bits of the response obtained. The second application will be the deactivation of an attack sensor before its use, by exposing it to laser radiation when it is powered off. The aim here is to render the sensor non-functional once it is powered. Finally, we plan to illustrate the developed fault model by applying it to two existing systems, resulting from previous ANR projects, and which use the security primitives described above. Thus, we will first target the intellectual property protection system of the SALWARE project, protecting IP cores against illegal copying. This system is based on the intrinsic identification of the different instances of an IP core using a PUF, and the possibility of cloning the PUF would make it possible to illegally activate several components from a single legal activation. The second target device is an integrated substrate current sensor, known as BBICS, from the ANR LIESSE project. The objective here is to raise the detection threshold of the sensor to make it insensitive to the currents induced by a laser attack carried out later. Finally, once this original threat has been clearly identified and validated, we will propose countermeasures that are adapted and suitably designed.

Smart orthopedic implants open up very interesting prospects, particularly for the improvement of post-surgical follow-up. However, nowadays, the technologies available are not adapted to power fully-metallic prostheses used in orthopedics. This project aims to exploit a power transmission solution based on acoustic waves to transmit power in a knee implant. A knee joint model will be developed using new statistical modeling methods integrating acoustic parameters. In addition, the admissible input power levels will be studied to limit the physical mechanisms (thermal, cavitations) and remain below the values set by the standards and used by the commercial ultrasound equipments. This model and the input data will then be used to design, optimize the power transmission solution with both analytical and multi-physics Finite Element modeling methods for a tibial knee implant embedding piezoelectric transducers. We expect the acoustically powered system to receive an amount of electrical power within the 1 mW to 10 mW range at the receiver side while being compliant with medical standards and using commercial ultrasound probes at the transmitter side. Prototypes will be assembled and tested first on five knee phantoms elaborated within the project and then on three cadaveric specimens at the anatomical laboratory of the Brest CHRU. The proofs of concept (PoCs) will then allow to power a new generation of smart orthopaedic implants embedding sensors, that are more robust and more reliable, facilitating industrialization and ultimately allowing better clinical management.

This MRSEI demand will enforce the relevance of the targeted European project EIC Pathfinder. This project meet together aconsortium of five partners : Grenoble INP as a coordinator,the CEA, a French SME Panoramic Digital Health, Aalto University in Finland and the FraunhoferInsitute IZM in Germany. The goal of IMHOTEP technology is to provide a connected device for both the doctor and the patient to detect the very first sign of melanoma to help diagnose the patient earlier and significantly improve prognosis. Our long-term vision is that IMHOTEP, will enable at-home, painless, non-invasive, short-time diagnosis, thanks to a compact, wearable, low-cost, reusable melanoma sensor included in a simple patch to apply on the suspicious area. “An early detection of melanoma: one patch on a mole on the skin”. The IMHOTEP project brings together cutting edge technology components to deliver a novel sub-THz imaging device suitable for use in a wearable way with the potential to be translated into a commercially viable product for home based patient monitoring. As well as combining the technologies for the very first time (high risk mitigated by the consortium expertise), the miniaturisation of the combined product as well as its ultra-low energy consumption make it suited for incorporating into wearables devices and/or skin patches. The clinical focus on IMHOTEP is melanoma (high risk mitigated by previous bulky volume imaging at similar frequencies on gastric tissues). However skin sensors offer the opportunity to quantitatively measure anything from skin hydration, wrinkles, lesions with commercial opportunities in both cosmetics and skincare as well as health applications. IMHOTEP is definitely a high risk / high gain project. The skincare market is growing and is expected to reach $189 billion by the year 2025 and this growth is leading to greater interest in skin analysis (ref. IDTEchEx report on skin sensors). With many technologies currently limited to use in the clinic due to their size and expense, this novel product has the potential to disrupt the market and open up advanced skin analysis to a much wider audience. Panoramic Digital Health (PDH), an SME partner with experience in the digital health market, provides expertise in developing prototypes and commercialization of wearable sensors for medical applications. PDH can lead a follow-up project to further advanced IMHOTEP TRL and industrialize the technology for applications in melanoma, and others that may emerge. Identifying commercial opportunities for the output of IMHOTEP will be supported by the Scientific Advisory Board (David E. Fisher, Professor at Harvard Medical School, Dermatology dpmt. / Luigi Boccia, Professor at the University of Calabria, Italy as a sub-THz antenna specialist / Ti-Hive that is a Grenoble SMEspelialized in production monituring through sub-THz sensing and imaging / Patients Association – to be defined). The target call within HORIZON EUROPE concerns the European Council of Innovation – Pathfinder - Open 2022. Three meain reasons : • IMHOTEP deals with an innovative device for a sub-THz sensor integrated inside a patch --> EIC. • Target TRL at the end of the project will reach 3-4 --> typically a Pathfinder. • IMHOTEP was already submitted in May 2021 (with a funding demand of 3 239 963 € reconducted in this edition), with encouraging evaluation report. A specialzed office in innovation will be consulted to help us to evaluate the relevance of our improved version (business model and complementary applications), justifying in part the MRSEI demand. The complementary funding will enable two consortium meetings.

The efficient exploitation by software developers of multi-core architectures is tricky, especially when the specificity of the machine is visible to the application software. To limit the dependencies to the architecture, the generally accepted vision of the parallelism assumes a coherent shared memory and a few, either point to point or collective, synchronization primitives. However, this requires to share information between may if not all the nodes. Unfortunately, as soon as the number of core is around 10 (ten), the communication cannot occur on a shared medium anymore, and designs make use of bus hierarchies or Networks on Chip. This latter solution is clean and efficient, but each core can see only the communications it is the target of, and unlike shared but, cannot spy what is going on between other cores. This is particularly difficult when implementing cache coherence and collective synchronizations, and a possible solution to overcome this issue is to use radio communications on chip. By nature, radio communications provide broadcast capabilities at negligible latency, they have thus the potential to disseminate information very quickly at the scale of a circuit and thus to be an opening for solving these issues. In the RAKES project, we intend to study how RF communication can solve the scalability of the above mentioned problems for architectures with a large number of cores (>256), by using mixed wired/RF NoC. We plan to study several alternatives and to provide (a) & virtual platform for evaluation of the solutions and (a) an actual implementation.