LONDON — Multicore compilation and multiprocessing architectures are set to be at the heart of a three-year program being put together by research organization IMEC vzw (Leuven, Belgium), as a vehicle to move its design research work forward. The project is expected to run from mid-2007 to mid-2010 as a follow-on to IMEC's current design-oriented research program, known as M4, standing for multimode multimedia.

IMEC has already signed up two industrial participants to the next research project, but is not releasing names, including the name of the project. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., is the leading participant in M4. Freescale Semiconductor Inc. CoWare Inc., Arteris SA and Mentor Graphics Corp are also participating in the M4 program.

IMEC has focused in recent years on portable wireless terminals and software defined radio (SDR) as its application-specific research theme for design. Under the existing M4 program IMEC has developed a multimode wireless terminal demonstrator including RF circuits and a coarse-grained VLIW (very-long instruction word) processor architecture, called ADRES (Architecture for Dynamically Reconfigurable Embedded Systems).

As work on M4 wraps up IMEC has created a spinoff company, M4S NV to commercialize some of its ideas, while it launches the three-year program to research the next generation of wireless systems.

Such systems may need to handle 2 Gbits per second or 3 Gbits per second of data transmission either on an ultrawide band (UWB) network or possibly on a 60-GHz carrier, said Rudy Lauwereins, IMEC vice president responsible for design research, in an interview with EE Times.

"We need at least a factor of 20 more compute performance," "We think we can get a factor of four from process but for agile radio we need extremely parallel processing internally," he added.