In the context of high performance systems and critical applications, the general objective of the project is to design Self-Adaptive Systems which are capable of monitoring the surrounding environment and adapt themselves to different scenarios and requirements. In other words, a Self-Adaptive System must be able to provide the required high performances regardless the application mode and despite the changing environmental conditions. The fundamental concept of self-adaptation by itself is not completely new: self-calibration techniques applied after manufacturing have been developed to deal with the many sources of technological variations and self-compensation techniques applied during the lifetime of the system have been developed to deal with the ageing effects. In this project, we address two non-classical cases of self-adaptability: self-adaptation to the application and self-adaptation to the environment. Concerning self-adaptation to the application, on one hand, the performances of the complete system within the application are limited by the performances of each individual component or sub-system. On the other hand, the performances of the individual components or sub-systems are optimized for a large range of future systems or potential applications and not for a specific one. The originality of the approach proposed in this project is to ‘anticipate’ the system deployment while designing the components, i.e. the components are designed with an integrated ‘Self-Adaptation Circuitry’ which enables them to autonomously modify their electrical characteristics when they are deployed into the application, in order to optimize the performances of the complete system. Concerning self-adaptation to the environment, it is to note that the performances of the system also depend on the changing environment. As an example, a cell-phone system may communicate differently when it is operating in-door or out-door, when there are obstacles in the measurement environment that could disturb the reception, etc. Here again, the components, provided with a dedicated ‘Self-Adaptation Circuitry’ (SAC), may be able to autonomously adapt their electrical characteristics to the changing environment, in order to optimize the system performances. This second case is more complex than the adaptation to the application that is typically performed only once when the components are integrated into the system. In addition, the range of possible applications is known at the time when the components are being designed. On the other hand, adaptation to the environment has to be performed continuously with the operation. In addition, the environment modifications or evolutions are intrinsically unpredictable. This is why we tend to qualify as ‘static’ the adaptation to the application and ‘dynamic’ the adaptation to the environment. Although the methodology proposed in the project is generic and can be virtually applied to any high performance system, it will be demonstrated in the context of e-health. To this end, the project focuses on e-monitoring where the patient is equipped with one ingested sensor which communicates with an external electronic device. This device plays the role of a gateway to a network infrastructure. In this case, the two main performances that must be guaranteed are i) the quality of the communication and ii) the power consumption of the sensor. In this project, we plan to develop generic solutions for static and dynamic adaptation for medical devices deployed in e-monitoring systems. We identified three critical cases in classical medical devices: electrical device with passive front-end, electrical device with active frontend, and power management of the application. The objective of this project is to address these three cases. All the developments will be validated on two prototypes: a Near Field Communication (NFC) circuit for the passive front-end example and an electrical medical pill for the active front-end example.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Phase 2 will take advantage of Advanced Technologies based on densely packed phased array systems for observing directly the sky, or for use as the receiver system at the focus of large collectors. These systems will provide extremely large fields of view for unprecedented mapping speeds, thus making it possible to make large all-sky surveys which will be used to understand fundamental problems in physics, including the nature of Dark Energy and the process of formation of the first stars in the Universe. The development of these phased array systems as a viable technology for SKA depend not only on their performance, but on their affordability. Recent advances in integrated circuits have made it possible to demonstrate the feasibility of densely packed phased arrays, in particular with the EMBRACE system currently operational at Nançay and at Westerbork in the Netherlands. The current proposal is concerned with further integration of components in an analog integrated circuit, ultimately combining a filter with Low Noise Amplifier in a single chip, and Analog to Digital Converters with Serialiser in a single chip. This will represent an enormous savings in manufacturing cost and operating cost with reduced power consumption compared to discrete components. The technology also has a large number of applications outside radio astronomy, and novel techniques developed during the course of this study may be submitted for patent.