Hardware demonstration platform achieves public domain

EMC² – Embedded Multicore systems for Mixed Criticality applications in dynamic and changeable real-time environments – is a €94 million project involving around 800 man-years of effort with 101 partners from 16 European countries.

The objective of EMC² has been to establish multicore technology in a diverse range of embedded systems domains by finding solutions for dynamic adaptability in open systems, handling mixed criticality applications under real-time conditions, with flexibility and scalability, and delivering full-scale deployment and management of integrated tool chains, through the entire product lifecycle.

The EMC² project was structured into 12 Work Packages comprising six Technology Work Packages covering the technical developments and six Living Labs focusing on applications. Sundance’s principal involvement was in Work Package 4 (WP4) dealing with multicore hardware architectures and concepts.

“Having hardware-centric SMEs, like Sundance, involved in Artemis EMC2 to architect and develop hardware demonstration platforms has been fundamental to the project’s overall success,” said Dr. Werner Weber, Senior Principal at Infineon Technologies and overall EMC2 Project Leader.

“The early availability of the Sundance EMC2-DP hardware demonstration platform proved extremely beneficial in giving the project’s application partners the ability to base their own project demonstrations and use cases around this hardware platform.”

Sundance has worked closely with CERN to place the design of the EMC2-DP hardware platform into the public domain using CERN’s Open Hardware Repository.

Launched in 2009 and following the philosophy of the free software movement, CERN set up the Open Hardware Repository to enable electronics designers at experimental physics facilities and elsewhere to collaborate on open hardware designs. Sundance’s EMC2-DP platform design can be found on the CERN Open Hardware Repository at http://www.ohwr.org/projects/emc2-dp/wiki.

"Open hardware shines even more when it is reusable, providing a basis for further improvement and experimentation,” said Javier Serrano of CERN and founder of ohwr.org. “The EMC2-DP board designed by Sundance is a great example, and I hope public funding agencies in the EU and elsewhere will continue to fuel innovation through openness in hardware design, as they already do for software."

As a consequence of its involvement in the Artemis EMC2 project, Sundance has added a range of commercially available EMC2-compliant products to its portfolio of PC/104 form factor single board computers and carrier cards.

These include board variants that utilise the Xilinx Artix-7 and Kintex-7 FPGAs and Xilinx Zynq SoC for I/O interfacing and processing as well as a carrier board for Trenz FPGA and SoC modules. Details of these Sundance products can be found at http://www.sundance.technology/som-cariers/pc104-boards/.

“Already, real and practical applications are beginning to emerge from the Artemis EMC2 project, including a smart camera application designed to determine train positioning in real time by capturing trackside information at fixed intervals at up to 300 km/h,” concluded Flemming Christensen, Managing Director of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology.