Infineon joins reconfigurable systems programme

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Mar 5, 2003

Infineon has joined IMEC's industrial affiliation programme (IIAP) focusing on technology for reconfigurable systems.

Infineon has joined IMEC's industrial affiliation programme (IIAP) focusing on technology for reconfigurable systems.

Infineon, one of Europe's largest semiconductor companies, is the second organisation to join the IIAP.

Through this programme, IMEC's expertise in design technology for reconfigurable systems will become available for Infineon's future SoC platforms.

Last year, IMEC launched the reconfigurable systems IIAP, focusing on design technology and platform architectures for reconfigurable systems.

More specifically, the IIAP targets the exploitation of reconfiguration to implement dynamic system behaviour.

It will enable "software-like" use of future reconfigurable SoC platforms.

Such future SoC platforms will consist of tiles containing combinations of application-specific components, various types of instruction-set processors, fine and coarse grain reconfigurable hardware, and memories, which will communicate through an on-chip network.

On these platforms various tasks will be created dynamically either in software or hardware and relocated at run-time from software to hardware and back.

In this way the requested QoS of the various simultaneously running applications will be guaranteed.

The IIAP therefore concentrates on architectural exploration, operating systems for resource management and dynamic task relocation, modelling of dynamic system behaviour and optimal mapping of dynamic applications on reconfigurable SoC platforms.

Within this programme, IMEC and Infineon will collaborate in developing an optimised architecture targeted at Infineon's key application areas.

It will take upcoming technology features into consideration to serve as a platform for future deep submicron SoCs.

Special attention will be paid to the architectural requirements for the platform to enable ease of programming and hardware/software multitasking.

"We are very pleased that one of Europe's leading semiconductor companies has joined our reconfigurable systems programme", said Dr Rudy Lauwereins, Vice President of IMEC's division on design technology for integrated information and communications systems.

"The combination of Infineon's expertise in platforms and technologies and IMEC's programming infrastructure assets for seamless hardware/software multitasking in reconfigurable computing platforms, will result in easy-to-use heterogeneous reconfigurable systems targeting future needs".

The first demonstrator developed in this programme is based on Xilinx Virtex-II fine grain reconfigurable hardware components and already constitutes a basic version of a hardware/software multitasking operating system in combination with an interconnect network for intertask communication.

It is currently being showcased at the DATE conference in Munich.

"Infineon is pleased to become partner of IMEC's industrial affiliation programme for reconfigurable systems technology to exploit the available expertise and to jointly develop new concepts for future platform architectures.

The participation in this programme adds to our long-term cooperation in technology and design of integrated systems", says Dr Christoph Heer, Senior Director Advanced Macros and Architectures, Infineon Technologies.