Munich, 13 March 2001….With the steady improvement of broadband access technology,  IMEC foresees that interactive services for the private customer will become a reality in the near future. However, to exploit the possibility of an interactive home to its fullest extent, two major technology breakthroughs are necessary in the areas of broadband wireless in-home communication and reconfigurable appliances.

At DATE 2001, IMEC hosts various live demonstrations at its booth to illustrate how such an interactive system can be implemented.

The majority of in-home interactive services will not be performed via a PC but rather via TV, set-top box or other appliances.  While these appliances currently have a fixed functionality, interactive services will allow these to be changed via the network. Reconfiguration of functionality can be achieved both by programmable processors or reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs).  A first step in this development is the realization of an FPGA-based Internet camera, the functionality of which can be changed over the network.

To connect these reconfigurable appliances to the access network, a broadband indoor communication technology is needed. For this purpose, IMEC has demonstrated a 54Mbps communication system based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and working in the 5GHz frequency range. Integrated solutions for both high-speed digital signal processing and radio front-end have also been achieved.  IMEC’s ultimate goal is to enable wireless communication between two or more terminals, with a capacity of well over 100Mbit/s, based on OFDM.  Current research at IMEC is therefore focused on turbo coding, adaptive loading and the use of multiple antennas.

Future applications will be strongly based on multimedia data processing, requiring new multimedia standards. This includes the study of new data compression schemes and their impact on implementation strategies (MPEG-4/21, JPEG-2000). IMEC is actively involved in defining these standards. New architectures that can cope with the heterogeneous characteristics of multimedia data, as well as optimization of data storage and transfer bottlenecks, reconfigurability, computing performance, power consumption and system cost are all being developed.

Such applications require complete systems-on-chip or systems-in-a-package, embedding both hardware and software. To develop these systems within an acceptable time-to-market and cost, a systematic design flow is required. IMEC’s SoC++ design environment is based on its vision that embedded system design should comprise an executable model in which functionality, structure and timing can be refined concurrently from concept to implementation. The object-oriented capabilities of C++ are exploited to integrate different modeling styles at different abstraction levels into one design environment.

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Notes for Editors:

2. Low power pre-compilation of multimedia applications on programmable processors with emphasis on data bandwidth and storage
3. ATOMIUM / MemoryCompaction : automated memory size reduction for multimedia applications
4. Efficient  and accurate simulation of substrate noise generation from large digital circuits

About IMEC

IMEC was founded in 1984 and today is Europe's leading independent research center for the development and licensing of microelectronics, and information and communication technologies (ICT). IMEC is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, and has a staff of more than 1000 people including more than 200 industrial residents. Its more than $100 million revenue is derived from agreements and contracts with Flemish government, the EC, MEDEA, the European Space Agency, equipment and material suppliers and semiconductor companies worldwide. IMEC's activities concentrate on design of integrated information and communication systems; silicon process technology; silicon technology and device integration; microsystems, components and packaging; advanced training in microelectronics. IMEC has a sub-0.25µm 200mm pilot line and is ISO9001 certified. News from IMEC is located at www.imec.be.

For more information:

Marianne Van den Broeck

Public Relations and Marketing Communications

IMEC, Kapeldreef 75

B- 3001 Leuven, Belgium

Tel +32 16 28 14 91     Fax +32 16 28 16 37

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