• Required Education Level: Master’s degree (or equivalent) in electronics or embedded software.
• Professional Experience: No prior professional experience required.
• Duration & Location: 24 months, at Rennes (France)
• Salary: Gross monthly salary starting from 2695 euros, depending on degree and experience

Context

The SmolPhone project is a research-action initiative in the field of frugal computing. Practically, it aims to design a type of low-tech smartphone with a one-week battery life. The goal is not to optimize a conventional smartphone but rather to reconsider usual design choices in mobile computing. The project aims to serve as a research ground for low-tech and frugal computing. For more information, see https://inria.hal.science/hal-04156447 and https://inria.hal.science/hal-04589322.

Objective

The objective by the end of the contract is to have an open and modifiable hardware devboard for a frugal smartphone built around a microcontroller and ultra-low-power peripherals for the screen, 4G modem, and Wi-Fi connectivity. A Cortex-A64 co-processor will occasionally handle compute-intensive tasks. To achieve this, the
recruited individual will need to design several generations of PCBs to integrate the necessary components, starting with a test devboard and ideally concluding with a complete demonstrator.

The aim is not to design a marketable product but to create an experimental platform that will serve as a foundation for future research in frugal computing at the Inria institute over the coming years.

Mission

The first year will be dedicated to the design of a 2000s-era smartphone centered around a microcontroller. The outcome should be open source and easy to tinker with: the pins of all components will be easily accessible to allow for potential hardware extensions, the board will offer all necessary measurement points like a classic devboard as well as self-diagnostic functions, and the whole system will be properly documented to be accessible to knowledgeable amateurs.

The second year will focus on hardware modularity and optimization. There are many 4G chipsets that are poorly documented. While a suitable reference might suffice for the first year, a more thorough comparative
study will be necessary in the second year to find the most appropriate reference for our needs. Similarly, other microcontrollers will need to be evaluated once the software requirements are better understood. The PCB
form factor should also be improved by the end of the contract if possible.

The recruited individual will also participate in the writing of scientific articles presenting the developed platform in collaboration.

More info: https://people.irisa.fr/Martin.Quinson/Research/Students/2024-fiche-poste-smolphone-hw-EN.pdf