Electronic design: a new field of investigation for large scale optimization

International audienceMobile phones, music players, personal computers, set-top boxes and countless other digital electronics items are part of our daily life. These nomad devices offer more and more functionnality. For example, recent mobile phones allow to communicate, to take pictures, to play video, to listen to the music, to watch TV, to access to the Internet... Thus, the integrated circuit (IC) achieving all these functions become more and more complex. Designers aim at developping these products taking into account two main axes: - shorten the delay to reach the market - reduce the size of these devices For a long time, designers are using a lot of optimization techniques such as Integer Linear Programming, heuristics and metaheuristics. A two year observation of those behaviors has led to the following conclusions, even if the electronic community know these techniques, there is a great need for more formal techniques, more appropriate models and efficient soving approaches especially designed for their specific problems. The talk, after a global introduction will introduce several problems where the help from the metaheuristic is needed and for which collaborations are necessary. This talk will be the starting point of the creation of a network for long term collaborations