Recherche transversale
The research activities carried out in both main themes (Technologies for CAD and Multiphysics systems and microsystems) meet on a cross-cutting research activity dedicated to engineering for biology and medicine, which is one of ICube laboratory's cutting edge research area. This cross-cutting research comes into various activities.
Tools for biological synthesis
The large base of knowledge in the area of technology for integrated circuits design can be applied to other domains and on media that differ from semiconductors such as biological synthesis. This is a new technology where biotechnology meets semi-conductor and computer sciences. The goal is investigate the possibilities to adapt IC Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools for biological systems conception. This could help biologists to create new biological functions by assembling appropriate elementary blocks (DNA sequences) as in the synthesis process of digital integrated ICs. One activity of the SMH team precisely consists in identifying and make use of the similarities to IC conception. This activity is bound to "Technologies for computer aided design" activities as far as the elementary blocks modeling and CAD tools (components library, biological synthesizer, dedicated simulator, optimizer ...) development is concerned.
The figure below shows the 4 principal steps of a system's conception flow using CAD tools, i.e. 1) high-level automatic synthesis, 2) elementary functions library low-level synthesis, 3) virtual prototyping (modeling, simulation and optimization) and 4) final assembly for manufacturing and test purpose. Our team mainly addresses steps 1 to 3. For step 1, we proposed to adapt an open-source logical synthesizer in order to perform elegant high-level synthesis. For step 2, we have been investigating the potential of evolutionary algorithms. For step 3, we developed various VHDL-AMS models and formalisms able to describe biological systems together with a tool that can generate biological models using generic bond description between a macromolecule and a ligand.
