Expertise and trade-offs in competence transfer from academia to industry: a successful case study

Abstract

How can a highly-technological medium business afford to incorporate upfront all the necessary expertise to keep up with innovation? It can not. In this paper, we present a project in which such a business bootstrapped expertise acquisition in the field of reconfigurable architectures. We, as academic researchers and technology experts, fostered the competence transfer towards the partner's research and development team. We achieved it by exploiting current state-of-the-art High-Level Synthesis tools and processes to carry out a design space exploration to successfully accelerate an algorithm, maintaining its structure unaltered, even if not designed with FPGA acceleration in mind. This effectively built a solid bridge between domain and technology experts to enhance the competence transfer process.