X-HEEP community is growing fast: X-Agora at EPFL

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achievements internetofthings memory research wearable

The Internet of Things is expanding at an incredible rate, and consequently demands for ever smaller intelligent hardware are constantly increasing.

The Embedded Systems Lab has collaborated with other EPFL teams and EcoCloud to design X-HEEP: a RISC-V chip which is aimed at tiny platforms with big jobs to do. The X-HEEP platform is open source and polyvalent, and can be used for any number of different applications.

RISC-V – pronounced “risk-five”
Reduced Instruction Set Computer

Agora – Greek for marketplace
Open discussion about burning issues

The X-HEEP community is constantly growing, with new members joining all around the world. To keep the whole community aware of the different developments going on, the X-Agora has been created as a place to present ongoing work and discuss new ideas.

The inaugural X-Agora took place on the 1st December, 2023 at EPFL, and was organized by Juan Sapriza, PhD student at ESL-EPFL. Taking part were researchers from several institutions: ESL-EPFL, EPFL EcoCloud, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (DACYA-UCM), Universitá Degli Studi Di Udine, Politecnico di Torino, Imperial College London (ICL).

The developments presented covered many different areas, including:

  • FEMU, the X-HEEP platform for the evaluation of biomedical applications on FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays)
  • PHEE, a standalone posit arithmetic system (for the calculation of long numbers)
  • HεεPsilon, a platform where transformers and CNNs are being accelerated through a CGRA (Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays, used in smart wearables)
  • HEEP-Alive, an edge-AI processor for the future developed in collaboration with IMEC that combines X-HEEP as a host processor and VWR2A (a Very-Wide-Register Reconfigurable-Array)
  • HEEPie, an elastic CGRA for X-HEEP
  • HEEPerator, an X-HEEP plus near-memory computing combination
  • MetaWearS, a seizure detection application based on transformers that targets X-HEEP as template of a future wearable platform.

X-HEEP will be discussed and showcased in a workshop at the conference DATE 2024 on March 25th-27th, 2024.

The next X-Agora event will be held in Spring 2024.

There will be an X-HEEP workshop at the DATE conference in Valencia in March, 2024.

You can find the X-HEEP repositories in the following URLs:
X-HEEP repository
FEMU repository
FEMU SDK repository

Visit the X-HEEP project page here.

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