What prompted the setting up of Pilsi?

The Grenoble area is at the cutting edge of international research in two fields: micro and nanotechnology, on the one hand, and software technology, on the other.
We have here all we need – in terms of science, technology and industry – to rise to the challenges posed by miniaturization, nanotechnology and converging hard and soft-ware. Pilsi aims to bring together under one roof software technology specialists from research, university and industry in order to consolidate their expertise and turn the Grenoble area into a global reference for smart miniaturized solutions.

How is the cluster organized?

Pilsi was started by three national research organizations – the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (Inria), France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) – and two universities, Grenoble-INP and Universite Joseph Fourier (Grenoble-1). It also draws on the Minalogic competitiveness cluster, which represents industry. The local authorities, which realized long ago that the best way of maintaining jobs in the area was to support innovation, are also fully committed to the process. Pilsi is organized around three main concerns: upstream research, applied research and training. It should ultimately bring together more than 1,900 people. The integration research centre (CRI) started in late 2009 is Pilsi’s first major creation. Its purpose is to build bridges between industry and research to cut down time-to-market for innovative products, particularly smart miniaturized solutions. CRI, which is based on a unique system specific to each programme, will have a team of about 300 people within five years.

What about the projects under development and the outlook for the future?

There is no shortage of potential applications in transport, communications, energy and medicine. Our first programme, backed by CEA and STMicroelectronics, should enable us to deliver technologies for designing and programming multi-core architectures. The goal is to give embedded technology processing power that is both highperformance and locally produced. Other projects are taking shape around ambient intelligence, low-power/high-performance calculators, and smart healthcare systems (autonomy and remote supervision, computer-assisted surgery, etc.). Pilsi’s future home – which will house the cluster’s demonstrators and technology platforms – should be completed by 2014. It will be a showcase for all that we are already capable of doing in terms of sustainable, ambient intelligence in building.