Program focuses on reconfigurable systems

Next week at DAC IMEC will launch an IIAP industrial affiliation programme that will focus on technology for reconfigurable systems.

Next week at DAC IMEC will launch an IIAP industrial affiliation programme that will focus on technology for reconfigurable systems.

Within the programme, IMEC will develop, together with industrial partners, design technology for reconfigurable systems targeting networked portable multimedia appliances.

Over the last three years, IMEC has built up extensive expertise in design technology for embedded computing platforms containing instruction set processors in combination with reconfigurable hardware.

The mission of this new IIAP is to build design technology which enables the programming of heterogeneous reconfigurable platforms with the same ease of use as current technology allows for general purpose processors.

Key activities will include the development of an operating system that enables true hardware/software multitasking and the integration of interconnect networks on silicon for task-level reconfiguration in reconfigurable hardware.

The new IIAP will focus on reconfigurable systems technology targeted for networked portable multimedia appliances but the results will be much more generic and useful in other application domains.

Multimedia applications such as MP3 players, internet browsers and games running on portable devices such as PDAs and phones are computationally intensive and have a lot of parallelism.

This prevents them being implemented on general purpose embedded processors.

Reconfigurable computing not only provides a solution to this problem but also addresses flexibility and computational power issues.

Potential partners of the program are providers of technology for reconfigurable systems and system houses targeting reconfigurable platforms.

The program is intended to run over 3 years.

"With the current evolution to ambient intelligence, reconfigurable systems will soon have a huge market potential.

However, an ease-of-use design technology for the programmation of heterogeneous reconfigurable platforms is required", said Dr Rudy Lauwereins, vice president of IMEC's division on design technology for integrated information and communications systems.

"Industry has already shown interest in developing the necessary technology jointly with IMEC.

By setting up this industrial collaboration program, we will be able to accelerate developments".

To support the launch of the IIAP, a demonstrator will be shown at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in New Orleans from 10th -14th June.

The demonstrator is a portable multimedia device based on a reconfigurable platform that is able to run computationally intensive applications and currently features a video decoder and a 3D game.

IMEC's industrial affiliation programme (IIAP) formula is recognised worldwide as one of the most successful partnership schemes in research and development.

The collaborations are based on shared costs and risks and are built on sound intellectual property rules.

Back to top