New architectures for smart cards: the OCEAN approach

There are today many and important reasons for giving future smart card generation new processors. This requirement is the result of more sophisticated applications that have to respect specific constraints such as response time and memory capacities. In a smart card, hardware and software are closely interdependent because the code is stored in a ROM at the production level. Thus, both hardware and software must be realized in a unique design process. OCEAN project (Outils de Conception et d´Evalution d´Architectures Nouvelles) has been proposed to respond to that constraint. It brings the possibility to obtain a global evaluation of the chip and its embedded software. The project comprises the OCEAN hardware description language, a specific C compiler to produce the application, a generic translator and an evaluation tool. OCEAN is a part of the ESPRlT CASCADE project