Today, 30th October 2022, the official site of the Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC) Group is created. For me, and hopefully also for my fellow colleagues, this date will mark the beginning of flourishing cooperation with each other and our industry and academic partners.
Sure, the effort of “unifying” our abilities has been around for a while, but creating a community is quite a challenge. An informal cooperation among the “founding” members exists back for many years and it was just time to form also a formal group to support various activities regarding Digital Design activities.
My firm belief is that the forming of this forum cannot more opportune then now. The local industry – not just in Cluj Napoca, the silicon valley of Transylvania, but also Romania and all over Europe – governments are concerned of (re)igniting the silicon industry in the European Union as the acute chip shortage could not be addressed with other means. As a result, public policies encourage investments into microelectronics and nanotechnologies. This means the creation of new job opportunities including digital designers from design and verification to physicals design of chips. Hopefully, the Romanian society will be receptive for the provocation of the next decades and will be active part of the solution. The IT industry is thriving in Cluj Napoca, including a fistful of companies that requires digital design abilities manly targeting FPGAs (former Digilent, now National Instruments, Analog Devices, etc.), but none of them ASICs. My personal assessment is that some companies wish to make the leap from FPGA to ASIC implementations, and they require the assistance of academics.
The ARC Group’s scope is to provide a forum where anybody can get an answer concerning Digital Design and related application areas (wireless communications, signal processing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc.). Our intention is to provide teaching resources and hand-on experience for beginners, lifelong learning courses for professionals, digital design expertise for companies. We are open 24/7!
Assoc. Prof. Botond KIREI