According to the latest news source from Portland, Oregon, EU targets leadership in the New-Generation “Smart systems Methodology. The European Union is going to initiate $13 million worth effort to develop standards for smart systems in three-years. The whole process will be coordinated by STMicroelectronics.
The initiative came as a reaction to the similar move coordinated by the US National Institute of Standards and technology. Recently, the US announced to develop standards for smart systems in a national effort. Europe has been pursuing smart systems for many years, and this effort merely puts together an initiative to standardize the smart systems on a development platform.
This important three-year project, aims to develop a leading-edge design and integration environment for the design of smart systems. This is an intelligent, move to regulate multidisciplinary ‘SMArt systems Co-design’ (SMAC) program. SMAC will create a design and integration platform to lower costs and time-to-market for smart systems development. Applications such as automotive, health care, energy, factory automation, and consumer electronics are also included in this program. Program officials have deemed advanced packaging technologies like system-in-package and chip stacking (3D IC) as vital. They intend to integrate all levels of the development effort into a single platform.
The SMAC program aims to put European companies into leading positions in the key markets by reducing design costs and time-to-market for next-generation smart systems. SMAC partners assert that the design methodology is holding back smart system development. At present, separate design tools are being used for different parts of the system in modeling, simulating, and designing MEMS sensors, analog and RF components, and digital ICs.
With actuators, power sources, and wireless communication capabilities, smart systems incorporate digital computers, RF devices, MEMS, analog electronics, etc. into software-driven applications ranging from humanoid robots to Smartphones. Smart systems are often put together at random. The US and the EU wants to standardize smart systems in an effort to create an ecosystem of interconnected devices and software modules to commercialize by the vendors.
We need “a structured design methodology that explicitly accounts for final integration,” said Salvatore Rinaudo, SMAC project co-coordinator and R&D Director at STMicroelectronics. “The SMAC project will give European industry an advantage in exploiting the potential of smart systems”.
Along with STMicroelectronics, the SMAC platform will be co-designed by Philips Medical Systems, ON Semiconductor Belgium, Agilent Technologies Belgium, Coventor Sarl, MunEDA, EDALab, and others. The SMAC project will involve a total effort of over 1,300 people per month and an investment of approximately 13M Euros, of which the industrial partners will contribute around 5M Euros.
