Keywords
Citation
(2002), "IMEC announces industrial affiliation program", Microelectronics International, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mi.2002.21819cab.014
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited
IMEC announces industrial affiliation program
Keyword: IMEC
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.